Makes Wallace sound like a baroque Thomas Pynchon.
"One of the most moving sections of the book is a 100-page novella smack in the middle, written from the perspective of wastoid¹¹-turned-accountant Chris Fogel. Chris’ 1970s youth was spent in partying and shallow rebellion, once again, papering over a deep emptiness: “I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’”"
In a truly terrifying anecdote, Gibby Haynes of The Butthole Surfers was once Texas Young Accountant Of The Year.
I'm kind of afraid to read this review and not just skim through, since what I read gave me the feels that I'm going to try *once again* reading Infinite Jest and just giving up somewhere around page 100-200.
If you can at least white knuckle it to the thermonuclear / tennis match 'Eschaton', it's well worth it. Hell just read that bit, it's pretty well self contained as I recall
This is very true. It comes down to how you happen to be wired at a particular point in your life.
If it’s not working for you, put it down. Maybe in 10, 15 or 20 years it will be the cat’s meow. Or maybe it will always seem dreadful. Some things are just a matter of personal taste and perfectly fine.
also, we will sadly never have the lifespan to read all the books we want to, so reading summaries/reviews/sparknotes is morally acceptable (though, I, personally, will read all the books)
I think a lot of it comes down to whether DFW's sense of humor happens to match your own. I usually tell people that if they're not laughing out loud by the end of the early pot-binge chapter (chapter 2 IIRC?), it may not be worth continuing. If you don't find it funny, _Infinite Jest_ seems like a real slog. There are some really good things about IJ besides the humor, but why spent ages reading a work of fiction that you're not enjoying?
(also I would *never* recommend _The Pale King_ to anyone who doesn't already love DFW; parts of it are *deliberately* a boring slog, as the review author points out. Even for someone who does love him, I'd send them to the essays way before I'd send them to _TPK_.)
I try to encourage people re: Infinite Jest, that around p200 he stops throwing in new characters with scenes and set pieces that may or may not connect to anything else, and starts following people whose names at least you remember.
The introduction of Don Gately about this time is no coincidence; Gately is IMHO one of the greatest characters in literature.
For me the ultimate highlight/set-piece is not Eschaton, but the epic melee in the street at Ennet House, where Don has to confront three huge Canadians ('Nucks) there to kill the resident/cokehead/sociopath who enjoyed killing pets and ~10 mins prior had knifed their dog.
It's a Sam Peckinpaugh breathless flow of both violence and Don's internal POV, combined with a few other "camera-shots" of reactions or actions. It's maybe two paragraps but multiple pages of 8-pt double-justified type with no breaks because that is exactly the psychological way you experience intense events. (*) many many of the sentences and thoughts are indelible, but what elevates the scene is not just the prose but the fact that Don Gately feels a little ashamed that he is "almost jolly" at the prospect of a fight. (Gateley is "...twenty-seven and just huge..." and while he has no idea how he will stay sober one more day (it's been 444 days at this moment), he *definitely* knows how to brawl.)
Wallace said that Gately was loosely based on a real person he met at his first AA meeting, but DG only became a main character as Wallace was writing and realized Don's story was more interesting than Hal (who is basically the author as a young man, mixed with Dostoyefsky and Hamlet and "morbid self-attention" and Tom-Clancy-level Inside Tennis trivia and crap that seems brilliant when you are 25.)
BRetty
* - "It's not that things really slow down they just break into frames...." My best friend was attacked by two armed robbers, in front of his shop at 3:30 on a Tuesday aftn across from a middle school. Having noticed a strange car circling, he had, just <60 seconds before, ducked inside to grab his pistol and tuck it in his waistband.
He told me that the maybe 0.8 seconds while he drew his gun were an eternity, his mind asking over and over, "Am I going to KILL somebody?! Do I have to KILL SOMEBODY?!? Holy Shit!!!! I think I'm about to KILL a human being!!!? Fuck!!! I have to KILL SOMEBODY!"
Bravo! Calling it now, this will be my favorite book review. I think you really *get* The Pale King in a way that lots of reviewers didn't.
I happened upon some essays of Wallace's in 2012, and Good Old Neon hit me right between the eyes. I read Infinite Jest and the essay collections right away, and saved The Pale King for last.
I think about both IJ and TPK all the time - more than any other fiction book, TV show, or movie. I think I like TPK a little bit better? I wish it had been finished, but I think I like the experience of reading it more than IJ. (Wallace makes the reader feel boredom in TPK, but subjects the reader to disgust and extreme discomfort in IJ)
The subfootnotes are messed up on Substack, they all show up as part of footnote 18. Should probably be a part of the footnote they're linked from instead.
Substack just treats footnotes as hyperlinks within the article, and doesn't seem to really allow footnotes within footnotes. I discovered this the other day when a Substack I read but don't pay for had some footnotes on a paywalled article, and Substack wouldn't show me the footnotes, because they were below the paywall (even though the link to them was above the paywall).
They're not pure hyperlinks, since you can hover over them on desktop to see the footnote without clicking. But they are hyperlinks when you click on them. That wouldn't prevent them from being nested, you can put a hyperlink anywhere you want in HTML. Seems like it's just a limitation of the Substack editor.
Unfortunately, when the footnotes were below the paywall, the hover didn't show them! I had thought the hover feature was broken or changed until I saw the paywall.
> but a friend convinced me it would be funny anyway
Your friend was right. I would have been disappointed if you hadn't put nested footnotes in the review of a book famous for them. It'd have been like writing a review of a constrained writing work without following the same constraint.
In the past—before the 60s—cities defined lots and sold them. People, often small time speculators bought the lots, bought plans, hired builders to build whatever they thought would return on their investment, and whatever struck their fancy. The result was interesting cities with randomly styled houses at rather random prices. Today, we have mega builder Corps, who buy thousands of acres of farmland—that shouldn't be developed. These Corps hire planners with a goal to maximize the ROI—cause that's called diligence to the shareholders. Do you want your retirement fund losing money? —No, you want the corporation to return the greatest ROI on the building project.
So the corporation lays out the community, plot size, minimizing underground utility expense, minimizing street expense, optimizing lot size, optimizing home size, optimizing construction simplicity, optimizing materials usage, etc. ... which has the goal of optimizing ROI for the investors ... and this is why all new construction is between 2,200 & 3,200 square feet and costs about half a mil. Its also why you don't see 1,100 sq/ft on small lots going for $200k. The corp could build three 1,100 foot homes for $600k, or two 3,000 sq/ft homes for $1M. What's the best ROI? If the corp does the wrong thing, they're harming the shareholders (your retirement fund), the shareholders will sue, and they'll win. The corp will replace the CEO, the retirement fund's lawyers will score a lot of money, and the you? ... well, two outta three ain't bad.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. You point to the classic ROI/capitalism spoiling something and, in this case, resulting in rampant house prices. But, this supports my claim and is evidence against TGGPs, theirs being that millenials and co. are wealthier and better off.
An aside, their link's opening graph says mill's have higher *generational* wealth (ok so boomers are richer than their parents were)..and then seems to conflate this with regular wealth in its discussion..
I disagree with that posters description of why housing is expensive, but furthermore, the evidence is that millenials and gen-z are doing just as well or better than previous generations:
My contention is that the historical view incompletely represents the uncertainty of the present and the resulting stress. Even when things work out OK, it doesn't feel OK. Even if you can get a mortgage, you worry about your job or the economy. Even if you are healthy, you know you're one medical bill away from things blowing up. We're also just not building enough housing or enough of anything—we could be much, much better off and we're simply not doing it.
You don't think every generation had those worries? Those are universal and just part of being human.
I do agree with the last part though. The narrative about millennials and later being worse off is wrong....BUT with better policy, those generations could be doing MUCH better than they are.
In context, "generational" clearly means wealth of each generation.
Wealth is a terrible metric for this argument though, as most wealth is home equity. If like-for-like house prices have risen above inflation,* the average millennial may be richer than the boomer was but unable to afford a comparable family home because their money is locked up in a condo. The fact that if they both chose to live in an RV, the millennial could throw more of their money into consumer goods isn't very helpful.
The consumer goods really are both much cheaper and much better now though, in a way which isn't really commented on much because it's so boringly explained by "better technology" (although a more competitive market is probably an almost comparable factor).
*Which they seem to have in a somewhat meandering fashion, if my eyeballing of inflation-adjusted house prices and comparing them to square footage is right. It's hard to say, as Americans apparently do this weird thing we don't have in Europe where they build new houses.
As told in Construction Physics, the story is rather different. Building suburbs at really large scale and selling cheap homes at low prices happened after World War II, but economic conditions changed, so it’s rarely done anymore.
Come to Texas, then, and see the past in action. With a fun new wrinkle, the excavated subdivision - no more having to build homes conforming to the silly terrain, no more houses with a bit of view- when everything can be flat! Also sadly, no trees, ever, in this scenario.
Housing in particular is more expensive, so more recent generations, with the same amount of wealth as previous generations, have less housing and more other things.
Starting families has always been expensive, but in previous generations, it was considered so natural and second nature that people did it anyway. People are less religious, not because religion has gotten more unaffordable, but just because there's a broader set of norms available from which being non-religious seems ok.
I think there's also a zero-sum spiral of increased societal expectations. Raising kids to 60s standards would be pretty cheap (people forget how much life in the 60s sucked). But anyone who tried that today would be shamed by everyone around them.
Family formation is cultural. The Amish & ultra-orthodox do it even though they aren't rich. People in the past did it even though they were poor by our standards.
I am just reading to my small kids "The Sams" a German children classic from 1973. The hero is some clerk who is living in with a nasty Ms. Cabbage, renting a room in her flat. She also shares her cooking with him. That sounded still common then. And highly exotic now. My eldest is on state support; still, she is living in a 2 rooms flat alone. Buying houses is financially unsound (less and less of the Swiss are doing it, growing richer all the time); and "starting a family" ... who needs THAT? Next you will suggest ironing petticoats - or teaching kids to tie ribbons! ;)
I think the review is still pretty good (I voted for it to be a Finalist), but that part is really distracting for how silly and wrong it is. I complained about it in an Open Thread a while back without naming-names about which review I meant.
The Pale King, which is good when it's good and vice versa, is the only Wallace I've read, and I think this review is spot on at least thematically. Perhaps if I hadn't read the book, it would make less sense to me. (TPK did not inspire me to want to read IJ.)
IIRC, this is the only Finalist review of fiction this year which is written straightforwardly and doesn't use some silly gimmick. Considering Scott gave affirmative action to the fiction reviews this season, I found this result disappointing. There were some great reviews of novels that didn't make it IMO, particularly the ones of The Leopard and The Unconsoled.
I mean, using the Wallace style of footnotes in footnotes is a bit of a silly gimmick! But it's at least an earnest one, like the rest of Wallace's style.
Right! I had forgotten that because I didn't bother to read those footnotes because I hate that kind of stuff. It's one reason I will never read Infinite Jest.
This... was a good review, but I don't think it was great. It's making me reflect on some of the things I do when teaching, though, so that's very useful.
The reason I don't think it's great is that it seems to commit the sin of telling me why DFW books are important, without first persuading me that they're good. This may be the reason why the teaching of literature goes wrong so often in schools. I ended up with a mild aversion to everything that school literature classes taught me, and I'm starting to think that this might be the problem. The reason teachers teach Shakespeare/Old Man and the Sea/Gatsby is because they're important; and if they're not inspired teachers, that's the message they convey to the students, forgetting that in order to be important, first you have to be good, so as to get people to read the damn book in the first place.
I'm genuinely enthused about Shakespeare, and I try to teach it the way I like it, but inevitably I end up having to do some information dumps about Why You Must Lerne Thise, and it surely puts learners off. The bolder choice would be to say, fuck that noise, we'll read this play the way we like it... The pressures of exams are real, though, so it will take quite a measure of boldness. OK. I'll work on that.
So this was a useful remind about how to think and talk about literature; and a reminder that one of these days I should go and try and read a bit of DFW. That's not a bad takeaway, so thank you.
Your comment reminded me of my experience in school, when I think back on it it often seems to me that the point of school was really to discourage learning to an extent (ever get scolded by the teacher for reading ahead?), curiosity or even an appreciation for the subject. Have you managed to find a satisfactory answer to the question of why someone should learn e.g. Shakespeare at that time in their life? The impression I got was the reason is "because we say so and it's important you obey".
The weird thing is, I have! I got into teaching through parenting, and I got into teaching Shakespeare through reading Shakespeare with my own kids, and with my boys, it was kinda great. I wasn't aiming to get them to do exams, just to read the plays (and watch various movie versions) so that they'd know what it was all about. So we fought through the language together, jeered at the terrible jokes, and talked about whatever caught our interest. And there's enough weird and wacky stuff in there that we could always find something.
I don't think I quite inspired them to pick up and read Shakespeare for fun; the sessions were definitely driven by me. But it was all quite positive. I think they felt like it was just one of those weird dad things that dads do, and you put up with it because it's fine as dad things go.
Transferring that approach to other students has been much less successful. A big part of the problem is that most of my students are Chinese, and don't really have the vocabulary to cope with these texts. In practice, I don't spend my classes telling them either why Shakespeare is important or good; I just spend the time explaining what the words mean. So there's a level of disconnect there. But even on the occasions when we can lift our heads up and look at the ideas and characters...
I never realised before I did this how teaching Shakespeare is actually often a civics/politics/psychology class. Like, you need to know what racism is and who the catholics and protestants are and what kind of thing can happen in a fight for succession and how guilt or jealousy can poison things and... what drinking does and what youthful rebellion is and how money and love can both be factors in a marriage and... Yeah, for 15 year olds (the usual age they teach Shakespeare in Britain; lots of my students here in China follow a British curriculum), this stuff is massively eye-opening. I've started giving preliminary history/geography/psychology classes before reading certain sections, and if I can improve how I deliver those bits, then I might start getting somewhere...
I'm sure you've thought of this already, but you could make analogies to the classic Chinese novels like Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the second of which I have read). From what I can tell they occupy a similar place in the culture.
But yeah, cultural distance is definitely a thing; I remember for Japanese audiences they had to put an American-history lesson before the Lincoln movies that came out a while back.
Yeah, that's a good idea. I do mention those works at the beginning of each course, as I try to situate Shakespeare more clearly for them, give them an idea of when he was writing. (Interestingly, the level of linguistic difficulty of those novels for modern Chinese readers is quite comparable to Shakespeare, too.) But I haven't done much in terms of comparing the content of those books to what's in Shakespeare...
I'm a bit wary of it because: (1) not every student has read those books, or even seen the cartoon versions; (2) often their understanding of the books is extremely shallow, so I would end up having to teach the Chinese work, then circle back and apply the insight to Shakespeare... it might end up just creating more work for me.
But there still might be something worth pulling out of there... I'll think about it, thank you!
You're welcome! I read Three Kingdoms because I wanted to see if I could still read something hard, and Scott's review of a world where the nerds won was enticing. And I did, and it was really quite impressive, and surprisingly entertaining for a novel written for people in a different culture 500 years ago.
What got me was how *non*-alien the thing was. Most of the people seemed to have recognizable motivations--lust for power, loyalty to friends and family, lust for power, sticking it to the Man, lust for power... there's a concept of 'loyalty to your lord' we don't really have now, but Europeans had that too back in the Middle Ages. When Cao Cao wants dragons on his clothing, over here he'd want to wear purple and have a crown, but we recognize what he's after. Liu Bei is loyal to his sworn bro and makes everyone under him pay for it. And Zhuge Liang...well, he's every one of us doing the best he can while working for people not as bright as you. And among minor characters, Mi Heng is every annoying activist you've ever met, and Zhang Song delivers the burn to your pompous, lying boss you've always wanted to give.
I actually bought and downloaded Journey to the West and Water Margin (I wasn't nuts enough to think a romance novel would survive the cultural gap well enough to be interesting for me), but at the time I was thinking of trying to write again, and I figured if I read two great Chinese novels in a row that stuff would slip into my writing and I'd get attacked for cultural appropriation. But...now that I've given up, maybe it's worth checking one of them out.
Haha, yeah, that's all spot on. I definitely recommend JTTW, I came to really love it, though the repetition can get a bit wearing.
But yeah, you're right that they've all got plenty of psychological detail that could be usefully compared to Shakespeare. I'm thinking now of the empty city strategem, where...[checks]...Sima Yi sits and thinks through the possibilities of bluff, double bluff, and triple bluff. That's just a great reference for any game of chicken between two characters.
But only if the students know the incident well enough, of course!
Heh, like the line about hand waving literature professors. There is poetry which makes lit profs talk excitedly and wave their hands; conversely, there is poetry which is pleasant to read.
If you do ever decide to give IJ a crack (and would definitely recommend it, maybe after reading an essay or five to see if the authorial voice works for you), you'll have the great advantage of a deep familiarity with Hamlet. I don't, and have wondered sometimes what allusions I might have glossed over without it.
You can't read a play though, you can only watch a play. We wouldn't expect students to read the manuscript of a good movie and recognize its goodness, so it's not that surprising that Shakespeare's goodness is lost on almost everyone.
Oh, sure, so any decent course on Shakespeare has to include watching it. Not everyone has access to a live performance, but there are a lot of great movie versions.
I think the worries about teaching of literature apply equally to novels, though.
Have you thought that maybe "important" books became important precisely because they are good at something? Of course, many educational programs fail to convey what exactly it is that's good or important.
Since this was a book review and not a book chosen for a school curriculum, there is no obligation for the reviewer to think The Pale King is good. And that appears to be partly the case as they mention they wouldn't unreservedly recommend the book to others.
I think you're right though that there could have been more focus on what was good and bad about the book itself.
I knew nothing about David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, or The Pale King before reading this review. I am struck with the observation that I now know less about these topics than I did this morning.
The writing style of the review is captivating, and yet it has nothing to say. Is this part of the effect? a scathing indictment of postmodernism? or a scathing indictment of me for not getting it?
You know less now after reading the review than the nothing you knew before? How is this possible? Are you saying the reviewer included lies or their stye was so confusing that the meaning of some things has become reversed or indeterminate in your mind, leaving you with negative knowledge?
If nothing else the review clearly stated at least a few facts you wouldn't have known before: DFW committed suicide, the suicide occurred during the writing of The Pale King, etc. Perhaps you could think of a few more.
I've studiously avoided DFW due to (an in-person) revulsion for how his fans discuss him and his work - gives me an "imagine James Joyce except he sucks" feeling. However, this review is a finalist on this blog, and I'll have AI read it to me while I do some stuff later. I'm writing this comment as a kind of preregistration - I'm biased, so if I like this review it must be really great and well done.
I read IJ a few years back and it didn't remind of Joyce at all - loved IJ, found Portrait ok, and didn't take enough away from Ulysses to finish it.
My guess would be DFW's style is a highly polarizing one, because it is, well, highly stylized. I personally find him hilarious, but YMMV. I'd suggest starting with a couple of his essays (some are free online) to see if they vibe with you.
Oh I wasn't in any way implying that Wallace was at all actually similar to Joyce, or that I'd consider reading any Wallace. Joyce is amazing. I was just preregistering any comments I might make about this book review which I found intolerable. Didn't make it very far before giving up.
I don’t understand this. Without looking back, I can recall that the review described DFW’s progress from postmodernism toward whatever was to come next, which had to do with reviving sincerity and humanism without fully reverting to some kind of revanchist fantasy world, and in particular there are many mentions of the idea that “doing your job” is central to that vision in a way it’s argued not to be to modern leftists and (overly online) rightists alike.
As far as the books, we were certainly told that IJ is long and complicated and its fans are unpopular on the Internet but that the author, even as a woman, adored it anyway, while TPK is unfinished and contains a very nice novella in uncharacteristically simple prose. Was all of this really that hard to grasp?
For anyone reading this who enjoyed the review/DFW writing, I'd like to recommend "The Northern Caves" by nostalgebraist. It covers similar themes, and in particular the weight of dull, lonely moral responsibility that (the reviewer says) tormented Wallace reminded me a lot of Mundum.
I've never read Wallace, but everything I've heard about his work makes it sound very different from The Northern Caves, a work told linearly (albeit from one of the characters writing after the fact), focused on a small group of characters with no digressions, and with a clear beginning, middle, and ending.
I guess I can see some similarities in how it's about the fan community of a long weird fiction series, but given the main focus is on (the fictional book) The Northern Caves, which doesn't really have an analogue in the works of Andrew Hussie, I don't see how this is actually that relevant. (Nor do I see how that detracts from it even without this major difference.)
(In reading The Northern Caves, I did find myself feeling a bit disappointed that I couldn't actually read the Chesscourt books because they don't exist.)
It goes beyond thematic similarities. The characters in TNC are based on forum regulars from MSPA. The crazy theorist guy was based on crazy homestuck theorist BKEW, who still posts on tumblr. If you actually used the forum
back in the day it isn’t a mysterious and strange place, it’s just mundane and annoying since all the terms were fed through a fandom dictionary that doesn’t exist.
To me, knowing that Aaron is based on some dipshit who liked running his mouth too much answers the hook you mention immediately. It’s just nonsense that sycophantic homestuck fans were desperate to make look deep. I lived through that.
I was a MSPA forums regular and I never had an issue with The Northern Caves, the inspirations are fairly loose and indistinct. It's like saying a WWI historian can't enjoy Lord of the Rings.
Both are true. Tolkien was a medieval historian, as well as a veteran of WWI.
You may find ACOUP's analysis [0] interesting. Main take-away for me is that the battles were fought via morale, rather than via the sideboard. It also discusses logistics.
"I knew that Wallace had been posthumously #MeToo’ed ... the allegations weren’t great. And actually they weren’t even allegations"
I've always found something more-than-passingly-adolescent in the New Left's eagerness to cancel and shun. It smacks of the angry, disillusioned teenager who discovers that her "don't do drugs" parents once smoked pot in college and screams "I hate you I'll never listen to you again!" The anger, of course, comes from the pain of shattering a childish idealized vision she had of her parents: "I'm angry that you're not the perfect people I want you to be." So too goes the cultural cycle of valorization and condemnation that we've become so accustomed to. Whence the need for idealized role models that's so intense that we can't tolerate any evidence that they might not actually be able to live up to our impossible expectations?
I don't think it counts as an impossible expectation to hope someone you admire didn't try to buy a gun to kill someone. That's a pretty typical expectation in my life.
Every time stuff like this comes out about a celebrity, I have to think that there's ten thousand cases of a non-celebrity doing it and I don't hear about it because they aren't famous and it never came to any kind of formal legal case. It really normalizes it in my mind. It read a story like this, and it makes me think buying a gun with the vague intention of killing someone is perfectly normal, probably lots of people have done it and I just don't know about it.
He didn't try to kill him, he thought seriously about it. Everyone is a mess and lots of people do nutty things in the context of romantic relationships. Who knows what really happened and who goaded whom into what, exactly. The stories we hear are always one-sided and the truth is always more nuanced. We have a court system for dealing with actual terrible people. Outside of that it's just he-said she-said and talking shit about a dead person is just classless. Collectively deciding that a dead person was terrible because his very-ex gf (who was cheating on her husband with him, btw, so let's not think of her an some kind of innocent angel) said he was a shitty stalker-y bf 20 years ago seems more than a little adolescent. The only thing I know for sure is that she kept her mouth shut until the precise moment that DFW was no longer around to rebut her claims or provide context. Frankly that's all I need to know. Only a terrible person does that.
Yes people do nutty things all the time. Usually they don't involve seriously contrmplating murder.
A lot of people prefer not to get into public arguments with famous people. Doesn't usually help your career, and gets their crazy fans on your ass. I don't blame anyone for not airing that sort of thing till they're dead.
I believe it was Chris Rock who said "if you haven't seriously contemplated the murder of your spouse then you haven't been in love." I've seriously contemplated murder many times in my life. Never done it, but I think we do ourselves no favors in pretending that murder is an unnatural impulse. Obviously you shouldn't do it, but there's nothing wrong with you for thinking about it. Condemning it is not unlike the Puritanical 50's scolds who told boys they'd grow hair on their hands if they masturbated, or were going to hell if they fantasized about sex. If someone commits a crime then fine, but until then get the hell out of my head. Nobody likes the thought police.
>I don't blame anyone for not airing that sort of thing till they're dead.
I do. It's tasteless and opportunistic. She's a worthless cunt IMO.
If someone does awful things to you, you are allowed to tell other people about it after they're dead. I don't see how that could possibly make you a cunt.
Sure, she can tell her friends. But keep private things private. For all I know she wanted her husband dead and manipulated DFW into almost doing it. Relationships are complicated, people are weird, and women can be untrustworthy manipulative shrews. They do the dirtiest shit and then pretend like they were the victim (cf Amber Heard). I don't believe a single word of her story.
The thing that makes her a cunt is that she tried to make a name for herself by opportunistically tarnishing the name of a high-achieving person who wasn't around to defend himself, and she did so by revealing deeply personal details of a long-dead relationship. It's very cowardly to wait until someone is dead to do that, and the form of her attack should cast serious doubts on her reliability. It's trashy, low-class behavior and that leads me to suspect that she's also a self-serving liar. DFW was psychiatrically unstable; more so back when he was newly-sober and involved with Karr. She was older and more experienced. If we're going by the standard MeToo playlist doesn't that automatically make him the victim? Yes she's a cunt. Fuck her and fuck anybody who takes her story seriously.
>Who knows what really happened and who goaded whom into what, exactly. The stories we hear are always one-sided and the truth is always more nuanced. We have a court system for dealing with actual terrible people. Outside of that it's just he-said she-said and talking shit about a dead person is just classless.
Very much agreed.
>until the precise moment that DFW was no longer around to rebut her claims or provide context. Frankly that's all I need to know. Only a terrible person does that.
Nit: Sometimes people procrastinate, albeit starting to air grievances at the _precise_ moment DFW could no longer tell his side of the story is indeed very suspect.
Somebody whose life’s work is creating art dedicated to reconstructing a notion of human decency that could be central to the life of people again in a post-postmodernist world turns out to throw tables at his partner and take concrete actions toward committing murder and hang himself in a place where his wife will find him, and that doesn’t make you at all more concerned about whether he’s figured out a real vision for the good life? Granted these questions are richly complicated in general but the author of the review treated them unusually carefully; it seems like you’re responding to something totally different. This isn’t Al Franken pretending to grab a woman’s butt.
I have no interest in whether he was a good person. I only care if I find value in his work. Most of the best things in history were made by people who can be made to look terrible with the right framing. It's a pointless exercise. We're all flawed. We're not all talented. The retrospective shaming nonsense is just a way for sad, angry, talentless losers to tear down people who have actually contributed to the world. Fuck them. They're just bitter that they don't have anything to contribute.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case there's a huge amount of "the author" in his books that's just impossible to ignore. So much of IJ is like: "Hi, author here, this is a work of postmodern fiction so I, the author, am directly talking to you, the reader." And then you read about how he was directly inspired to write the book by his crazy obsession with his ex, and then deliberately commited suicide in a way that would shock his current wife. It's just hard, knowing that stuff, to read his stuff without thinking about what an asshole he was. It's like trying to admire the brushwork in a Hitler painting or something.
Hard disagree. The people with the biggest demons are the ones who have the deepest understanding of the human condition. It's no contradiction that someone who makes great art is also capable of terrible things, and IMO the belief that it is is a reflection of a fairly shallow understanding of life.
The reason the Hitler comparison is inappropriate is Hitler was a lousy painter. We only know of his painting because of the other stuff, so "admiring his brushwork" conceals a dark selection bias in the type of artwork you're choosing to analyze. Had the Holocaust been perpetrated by, say, a 70-year-old Picasso then there wouldn't in fact be any problem with appreciating his earlier artwork, but with Hitler we only know about his art because of his atrocities - the art has no merit in and of itself. With DFW it's the other way around: the only reason we know about his darkness is because his art was beautiful enough to warrant investigation of the author. Also you're just tripping Goodwin's Law.
I specifically suspect that Mary Karr, the noted fabulist, coy at best about how much of her ‘memoirs’ are fiction, who has never corroborated any of the amazingly well-told stories which have made her famous, who went public about these allegations just in time for her to claim a few extra pages in DFW’s posthumous biography… may have dramatized the events and left out some context.
I wouldn't be surprised if, forty years down the line, a new generation with different preoccupations goes back through all these accusations and finds a lot of them were pretty flimsy. Everybody always wants to prove the last generation was bad.
Yeah, it's kind of like David Brooks writing the morality book and then running off with a younger woman. Or 'Virtues' Bill Bennett getting caught losing all his money to online gambling. (I'm old.) The real-life action directly contravenes the message of the book.
My husband is a fan of his "History of Philosophy" so I once ordered a copy of "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell. I think that was the title. It was one of those take-your-luck used book things and I was amused to discover that the entire book - every sentence - had been underlined with occasional circling whose pattern was mysterious. Anyway, I don't think it's a bad book or anything, I didn't really get too far with it. But later on I reflected that it was kind of crazy that I thought I could better some more original source, with a self-help book from Bertrand Russell of all people. And obviously Bill Bennett, pleasant as he no doubt is, is no Bertrand Russell.
It seems to me that literary people always talk smack about each other so this doesn't move me the way it does you, but I did stumble over the "weren't even allegations" part.
I understand these things are supposedly or evidently corroborated by letters he wrote Karr but they don't seem to have been made public.
The idea that she would have a drama-free relationship or would even have been interested in that, seems improbable to me.
As Texas writer Don Graham once put it in a piece about Mary Karr (on the fairness or validity of which piece I make no comment, having not read her) but which certainly applies to many another in the genre: The Augustinian (sin) or Rousseau-ian (no-sin) confession is "the true father of the confessional memoir, a term that is actually something of a misnomer. The typical protagonist-narrator of such books does not confess his or her failings or sins (a word that rarely appears in these intensely secular books) but instead reveals dark family secrets, sensational “dysfunctionalities,” and, best of all, criminal sexual acts committed against the memoirist."
It has to do with the generational changing of the literary guard from men to women, I think. High-status men used to do these kinds of things to women and get away with it (in literature and in politics), and now that the women are in charge, they're going to return the favor and dig up all the bad things men did to women (things women did to men will of course be swept under the rug). All of DFW's pals used to look the other way; now that the gals are in charge they're going to listen to all the women he hurt along the way.
I also do think there's sort of a tendency for women to be the enforcers of morality, which is why you see that new moralistic attitude in the left. Young, rebellious guys used to storm the barricades for communism, now they're becoming tradcaths (but only in terms of regulating sexual morality for women) and posting physique.
These things aren't absolute, of course--nobody is a perfect representative of their gender, race, etc., and many people swim against the tide-- but *in aggregate* they have an effect, especially with things like literature that are prone to groupthink, fashions, and cliques. Most human endeavors are, of course, but the one advantage the physical sciences had, despite being subject to social and governmental pressure like anyone else, was the existence of an objective reality you can use to prove or disprove positions. But is David Foster Wallace better than Elif Batuman? Who's asking? Who are you asking?
The human condition is hard. How many of us can say we emulate our moral vector?
We are faced with so many dualities. We must strive. Strive for what's good and right, encourage this in others, yet simultaneously be gentle and understanding of our limited condition.
Life seems to bear many paradoxes. To me, I see someone who espoused tenets of humility, and, well, the many other things you describe much better than I could, but who nonetheless found themself—or at least perceived themself—to be living outside that (e.g. his desire for independence from Nardil, self-flagellation around careerism, etc.).
These can be difficult or impossible to reconcile, and a swift, expansive mind like his would find no shortage of ways to find and suffer them.
>This speech is set in the 80s, but was written in the 00s, when the internet was nascent and social media hadn’t yet taken off. Wallace’s diagnosis is prescient: between Quiet Quitting and Live to Work, young people are rejecting the tedium of office life and embracing the life of the influencer, which does indeed involve both the trappings of rebellion and conspicuous consumption.
Come on. Office Space and Fight Club were released in 1999 and instant cult classics; conspicuous consumption featured as something to oppose rather than to strive for, but rebelling against The Man in his shiny offices was central to their plots. Calling FDW "prescient" here is taking it a bit far.
Fight Club is definitely already making the point that the edgy rebels against conformism end up just as conformist as the establishment they're rebelling against.
> Cynicism in societal institutions is endemic on both the right and the left, perhaps with good reason: while a bureaucrat in the 80s could expect to own a home and support a family, these days an ‘ordinary’ job doesn’t cut it.
US federal employee pay is a little harder to find data on but the base pay for an mid-level (GS-10) bureaucrat appears to be ~$26k in 1989 vs $58k in 2022, again in line with a 125% increase and roughly comparable to the median Peoria income.
My best guess is that the beef, and the difference, between Boomers and Millennials has a lot less to do with affordability as such and a lot more to do with how okay Boomers vs Millennials are with being a bureaucrat in Peoria. Anyone care to change my mind?
> a lot more to do with how okay Boomers vs Millennials are with being a bureaucrat in Peoria. Anyone care to change my mind?
That doesn't really disagree with the theme of the review though. It's all about our difficulty to converge on what our expectations in life should be at this point, when the old ones don't work. So "how happy we should be at the idea of being a bureaucrat in Peoria" is up for reevaluation, like everything else.
Don't cry for the poor IRS agent. These people are lawyers and CPAs. The IRS has to compete with the private sector for talent, just like any other employer, and lawyers and CPAs do fine in the private sector. They do fine working for the government too, per this google search I did:
According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for an IRS Internal Revenue Agent is $89,000 per year, with an average additional pay of $4,000 per year. The total pay range is estimated to be between $75,000 and $116,000 per year.
I don't think they have to pass the CPA test either. I've heard the IRS called a "work program for those who get accounting degrees and can't pass the CPA" and I think there might be something to that.
Well, as far as I can figure out, there are no Federal bureaucrat jobs in Peoria anyway. https://greaterpeoriaedc.org/major-employers/ ... there's a Caterpillar factory and a big hospital and that's about it. Government bureaucrats tend to live in Washington DC or other big cities.
I agree with the idea that life isn't expensive if you're willing to live somewhere unfashionable, and that house price problems are concentrated entirely in fashionable areas. But it's not just a fashion thing, it's a problem that the economy of all first world countries has become increasingly concentrated in a small number of big cities, of which Peoria is not one.
The difference is that the people who live in big cities set the cultural tone, and in big cities housing indeed has become unaffordable for many people.
>Like this. I should add, I hope the affectation of footnotes for this essay isn’t cloying or obvious. I worried that it would be, but a friend convinced me it would be funny anyway, and besides, the piece was already glutted with many parentheticals so I figured, why not.
It is both cloying and obvious. The structure of the review very much mirrors the subject matter:
- Review author believes DFW is speaking to the reader from personal experience, and speaks much of her own personal history and relation to DFW's work.
- As mentioned, footnotes within footnotes.
- Abrupt end of the unfinished review like the book.
I find the review author to be emotionally much too closely attached to the subject to give a critical opinion of it. Also this makes it the second book review finalist this year where the review is in the distinctive style of the subject matter. I find this an off-putting gimmick in both cases, and I hope there won't be yet another like them.
Concur with this. I felt some emotions while reading this review, I learnt about the author, I learnt about the book, I learnt about the context it was written in, and overall I enjoyed this a lot and wouldn't mind more reviews in this personal style. (To be fair, I wouldn't mind more reviews in other styles, either, I'm enjoying the variety.)
It accomplishes one of the functions of a book review, in showing you what the book's style is like so you know whether you'll enjoy it. It's more illustrative than the typical "this book is rambling and self-aware" sort of description.
I really don't want that though. When I read that first poetry review, I learned nothing about the book or about poetry because I gave up halfway through the review, so how was that a good review for me?
It wasn't quite as bad in this review so I read through all of it, but I will still question the objectivity of the reviewer and therefore the usefulness of the review.
When I read a book about a foreign language I don't speak, I don't want that book to be in that language. When I read a book about encryption, I don't want the book to be encrypted. When I read a review of a book and author I don't know, I don't want the review to indulge in too much of that author's style if it gets to the point where it distracts me from the review itself.
"I find the review author to be emotionally much too closely attached to the subject to give a critical opinion of it. "
I agree this is bad if you're thinking of eg a systematic review of studies about gender transition, but why is it bad for a review of a work of fiction, which is inherently supposed to be emotional and about how it affects you?
As a metaphor: Let's say I was suffering from a genital rash. I see a doc, they prescribe something. The pharmacist offers me a choice of several creams with that active ingredient and, in addition to his professional opinion, recommends me one variant that helped him personally with the same condition. I'd be glad to hear it, and I wouldn't even ask for a single peer-reviewed study!
But then the pharmacist literally unzips his pants and shows me his junk to really convince me that the cream helped him. He goes on a lengthy rant about how it revived his sex life and how that gave him the confidence to finally divorce his estranged wife and propose to his heretofore secret boyfriend. I'd most likely be more than a little weirded out and seek a different pharmacist altogether even though him telling me all those juicy details objectively changes nothing about his professional qualification or medical experience with that wonderous cream.
Like you said, this isn't a peer review for an academic journal; I'm all for the reviewer importing their personal POV, whether or not the subject is fiction. This review was fanfic-adjacent though, which I'm not ready to fully accept as a style of review. I mean, Footnote 2? "Please let it be noted, I eat much healthier now.", with the sub-footnote "I lean sweet over savory"? Okay.
And then the abrupt ending of the review. The review is primarily of The Pale King, not Infinite Jest, so am I to take the ending as a suicide joke, or what? The jokes and personal anecdotes just feel off. Too much of a good thing. Less of that, please. Not nothing, but less.
I’ve never tried to read Infinite Jest because I heard that it was a Post Modern novel and I didn’t like the other post modern novels I started to read. Calling it a post-post modern novel makes me more interested in reading it. I wondered why I thought it was a post modern novel, so I googled best post modern novels, and sure enough, Infinite Jest was in the top 3 of every list. I assume this is a situation where the work that criticized its predecessors ended up being better than the rest, but it is interesting see that disconnect.
Postmodernism also has the disadvantage of having a name which implies it could contain anything after modernism and of being more or less the last product of a culture of Western literary criticism sufficiently focused to produce and name new movements; in both linguistic and semantic senses, it’s easy to argue that nothing comes after postmodernism.
Isn't it rather an advantage, for those who are mostly positive about pomo? And yes, it is easy to argue that nothing comes after it, because nothing has seriously challenged it as of yet.
DFW was a Reagan and Perot voter. He was anti-Bush, but this is very much a Didion trajectory. So it's hard today not to view him as at least somewhat of a "conservative" thinker. He also has a long essay where he defends prescriptivist approaches to language which puts him alongside people like William Safire.
I would have thought there's a good number of writers of literature who delight in language in all its variety, and are keen observers of the use of language by different groups, and want to participate in it.
Plenty of great writers use slang, if that's what you mean, but slang is very prescriptivist among its enthusiasts. Slang mutates quickly but given the time and place there's a correct and an incorrect usage of slang words and phrases.
A good writer will choose specificity over generality as much as possible and steer far from potential ambiguities (unless multiple meanings are the intent). To take an example, the word "bemused" is often misused these days. A descriptivist might say that bemused has merely taken on a new meaning over recent decades. The problem with the descriptivist view for a writer is that now the word has no precise meaning at all. It will be interpreted differently by different readers. That's rarely what a writer wants at the word for word literal-meaning level.
Haven't read *The Pale King,* but since a number of readers are using the comments to comment on the presumed unpleasantness of reading *Infinite Jest*, I thought it worth it to mention my experience. I inhaled *Infinite Jest.* I didn't read it because it's "important," I read it (twice) because I really, really enjoy it. Like, couldn't put it down, stayed up too late reading it. I think it's fun and funny, filled with hilarious sections like the part in which the protagonist's father subjects him to a drunken rant comparing the existential significance of a tennis ball's corporeal reality to Marlon Brando's slouchy acting style. I do have criticisms of it—DFW needed a more ruthless editor; the parts in which a trans federal agent and a wheelchair-bound assassin ramble about the nature of the world while watching the shadow of a mountain slooooowly process across a landscape are reeeeally baggy—but these criticisms are dwarfed by the sheer *fun* of it all. Highly recommended.
To counter some of the negative reviews, I think this was well written. I liked the footnotes and the mimicry of some of DFW's style. I may even finally go read Infinite Jest which has been sitting on my bookshelf for 10ish years. I'm not sure if this is my favorite review, but overall I enjoyed it.
Very interesting. The subject is hugely topical - the upheaval, restructuring and growing pains of modern culture, with post-modernism as one of its major phases.
Forgive me for giving it a rather materialistic interpretation to begin with. Socio-economic-cultural conditions had been pretty stable for centuries, life was very hard by today's standards, but culture had had plenty of time to converge on something that worked. Social stratification, wars and plagues, community life, religion, hard work, labor division within the family unit, the works. Then the industrial revolution happens, which brings economic conditions way up. Science happens, literacy increases, philosophy perks up, and suddenly all the traditional narratives and orders are in shambles, either because they no longer fit the conditions, or because we've stopped being able to believe them.
So what we get is a barrage of literal attempts of culture to find its bearings again. Great waves back and forth, positivism here, romanticism there, marxism over there, free market liberalism... eventually post-modernism and the minimalist aesthetic. It's hard to overstate how many references faltered. We've all heard the hot CW topics downstream of wealth and technology and individualism, like the sexual revolution throwing out a good chunk of our moral system, but you have weirder causal chains like economic growth paradoxically bringing cost disease, which makes housing expensive, so our great-parents' trinkets and furniture are no longer family wealth, but clutter. It's like pieces falling everywhere, the narrative myths of religion (chief of them: the myth of God as the adult in charge), the sense of community; much work becomes abstract and paper or screen-based, abstracted away from any gut feeling of producing something of value, and so on and so forth.
So I totally get it when DFW basically wants to say "yes, we can't just go back to the past, and yes, all our old certainties and values are in shambles and they're not coming back, but can we please get past the cynical phase? It's been a while, Nietszche and Sartre came and went, we've had time to mourn all the old certainties. But we're still humans, we're still here, we still have to get up in the morning and see our faces in the mirror and greet each other and get stuff done together, so can we please find some non-cynical way to continue the business of being humans and doing our human stuff here?"
What I find most striking about all this is the sheer intensity of feeling on all sides. It strikes me as just about excessive. The old cultural order was so sure of itself, so absolute, with God sitting at the top of a chain of validation all the way down to the pecking order within your family; I guess for a long time people really wanted to find some new absolute to replace that. And they tried, which is why all these *isms sound so damn prophetic, from the Romantics to the Marxists to the end-of-history-ists. And I agree with the reviewer that DFW in the end fell into the trap of excessive intensity; it doesn't get more romantic and intense than killing yourself. And the reviewer openly concurs, explaining the despair of their own fall from intense far-leftist ideology. The mind just refuses to let go of the search for some *final idea* that would put an absolute order to everything.
Except that there isn't one. And it's fine! Look, you're alive. Yes, you can care about things, you can be earnest within your domain, it's the sane thing to do. But you can also breathe, have some fun, smile, cry, forget, whatever. Maybe that's what DFW and the leftists and the rightists and the warriors and the hedonists all forgot - to have some balance, to do what needs to be done, and then still find yourself alive and dance for a bit.
Haven't read anything by DFW but the brief interviews of hideous man, but that and this review made me realize how much he was influent, at least stylistically, in these parts of the internet. The footnotes, the post-meta-ironic detachment. At least this blog and dynomight strikes me as particularly influenced by him. Am I reading too much into it?
I don't think I was especially influenced by DFW, especially not in eg my occasional use of footnotes. Works have used footnotes forever; DFW's innovation was using so many of them, in what was obviously a work of fiction, that it became kind of a gag.
I'm not sure it was even his innovation; sticking to funny modern writers nerds like, gag footnotes in a work of fiction formed an iconic part of Terry Pratchett's style. (Though he didn't use quite so many of them.)
It's been many years since I've seen a copy, but I vaguely recall there were some footnotes and other oddities in Tristram Shandy, a comic novel by Laurence Sterne written around the mid-1700s :
Approximately the same era, Flann O'Brien used extensive footnotes in his novel 'The Third Policeman' - an excellent book but maybe not so well known outside of Ireland. It was written in the late 1930s, but not published until later due to the Second World War.
The protagonist studied philosophy, and the footnotes detail the thinking of the fictitious de Selby, and the rival biographers and commentators. One chapter progresses the main story by one paragraph but features a six page footnote.
I’ve been using ‘wastoid’ regularly ever since I first saw it in the Chris Fogel section (which is available as a standalone novella called like “The awakening of my interest in advanced tax” for anyone interested in a small slice of pale king). It is a wonderful word. But I don’t append drug habits to it generally. Plenty of wastoids who just play video games and order door dash on their parents’ credit card.
This is a great essay, but a man who died from switching medications might not be the best laboratory for understanding how culture and philosophy can kill.
“The End of the Tour” with Jason Segal as DFW and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky the Rolling Stone writer that spent a few days interviewing and traveling with Wallace is a sweet take on Wallace’s persona and his neuroses.
It’s based on Lipsky’s memoir of his 5 day road trip with DFW, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”
I’ve enjoyed watching it a couple times. I think most Wallace fan would enjoy it too.
It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
I'm not much of a Wallace fan but really enjoyed that movie. I don't think one needs to enjoy DFW's writing to enjoy the fascinating dialogue in that film.
Cracked me up that he was eager to visit Mall of America. The place is just a few miles from my home but I’ve only been there once voluntarily. I’ve never understood the appeal of that soul sucking bit of American excess.
The late scene of Wallace dancing with a random young woman was kind of touching. Battling his personal demons in an earnest and practical way. Taking a bit of joy wherever he could find it.
this was cool. I've also been reading a lot of old DFW recently. I think the common characterisation of him nowadays leaves out how straight up funny he was.
I found it pretty hard to get through this review. I knew nothing about The Pale King going in. After reading the the first paragraph, I still didn't know if it's a work of fiction or nonfiction.
The third paragraphs mention someone named "David Foster Wallace". Is that a character in the book? Oh, seems like they're the author of "Infinite Jest", which if I recall, is a "exists-in-real-life" book -- probably fiction? So is The Pale King a non-fiction biography about Wallace, or is Wallace the author of The Pale King?
It's not until the twenty first paragraph that "The Pale King" is even mentioned again, at which point, we find out that Wallace is indeed the author of that book as well. But even then, the next few paragraphs are mostly... biographical stuff about Wallace, and we don't find out what the plot of The Pale King is until the thirtieth paragraph.
30 paragraphs is a lot to ask for before getting the "payoff" that I was expecting entering into this review. I think I would have appreciated something like what was done in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel where within the first three paragraphs, I'm told why I should care reading through any of this.
It was definitely problematic that the first two paragraphs didn't say who The Pale King was by (I was trying to remember if it was Nabokov, but that's Pale Fire). I recalled when the third paragraph mentioned David Foster Wallace, giving us the antecedent for the "him" in the previous sentence, but it definitely should have been clearer.
I think the curse of knowledge makes the antecedent relationship seem more clear than it actually is. I think a more natural inference for someone not familiar with any of the proper nouns involved is:
1) The first paragraph uses the noun "the author".
2) The second paragraph uses the pronoun "him", probably referring to "the author".
3) The third paragraph uses the proper noun "David Foster Wallace", but there is no reason yet to assume that "David Foster Wallace" and "the author" refer to the same person.
Yes. When I went back and looked I saw that the third paragraph had not in fact made this clear to anyone who didn’t have the relevant fact somewhere in the back of their head.
My earlier comment wasn't a request for help. I have several tools for learning more about a topic, Wikipedia indeed being one of them.
My earlier comment was intended as feedback to the author of the review, which they can incorporate along with all the feedback given by others in this thread, and decide if and how they want to change their review-writing process.
A review that you can’t actually read without checking Wikipedia throughout isn’t a great review.
Many publications always put the title, author, and bibliographic information about the book at the top of all reviews (I always thought it was a bit weird to list the publisher, number of Roman numeraled and regular pages, and the price of the currently available edition, but I can see that it’s often better to include all this than not).
I've never read Infinite Jest but have absorbed that is a influential book of today's canon. There is always a frustration when referencing literature, I feel this way when people assume I've ready book X or essay Y.
I like this piece a lot, but not as a book review, I think. There's just too little of the book in there. I appreciated the author's exposition of her own feeling regarding DFW, but I think there's too little of what she actually got from The Pale King in there and a lot more about her personal relation to Wallace's literature.
As some people have said, I think the author is too biased about the book to write a good review - but still, I think she's written a good piece.
Agreed; I want a book review, not a biography of an author. Honestly quite surprised to see that it's polarising rather than simply negative; dreading this winning.
In complete honesty, "solid B". Especially if the context is "read something from an unknown source with no strong prior reason to believe it'll appeal to you."
Over the last couple of months, I've been intentionally trying to expose myself to viewpoints that I disagree with, so I've been reading a lot of (subjective to me) F-'s, and it's been reeaaaaallly painful.
It depends on the rating scale and the reason for the A+. New, relevant information is important enough to risk it, but if it's just a matter of enjoyment (and static text, unlike e.g. a videogame where I can get hours and hours out of an A+) give me the B.
Fair enough. Now I'm glad I didn't go off on a whole-arse rant about AND WHAT PRAY TELL DO WE GAIN FROM LEARNING WHETHER OR NOT A TEXT SATISFIES SOME ANONYMOUS REVIEWER'S TEDIOUSLY BELABOURED AESTHETIC CRITERIA, and all the rest of it.
The answer to that is hidden in footnote 12. I've not read anything by Foster Wallace, but I suspect this was an intentional homage to him judging by all the back and forth about footnotes...? If so, and if it makes sense in the context of his writing, it was well done.
I read Infinite Jest when it was in the "new books" section in my high school library. I lost a lot of respect for David Foster Wallace when I read his book about infinity, and he got so many of the things wrong. But I still appreciate what he was doing in his fiction.
It probably helps that my intellectual background these days is in analytic philosophy, and his writing is definitely influenced (though not in a straightforward and literal way) by his (brief) graduate work in analytic philosophy.
I enjoyed this review. I actually put Something to Do With Paying Attention on my to-read list.
I've only read a few essays from Consider the Lobster. I loved the writing, but the attitude struck me as too post modern and threw me away. "Yet another ivory tower type poking fun at pop culture", was what I initially thought. Too bad, because I never got to the parts where he tries to use post modernism to fight post modernism, which I think is a worthy goal:
> Wallace is, of course, on team human. His criticism of the profit motive parallels his rejection of minimalism, the aesthetic of postmodernism: when we reduce reality to a thin, abstract variable, whether that be profit or discourse, we mutilate it.
I never made the connection between the two, but now it's so obvious. Bauhaus. Chrome-coated balloon dogs[0]. Painted girders[1]. All of it feels neutral, meaningless, like depression given physical form.
Ah, I'd been really worried this year's Book Review Contest was a complete atrophy into at-best-middling-in-prior-years entries, but this is an admirable return to form. Reviews the (real book!) content thoroughly, gives a sense of context and milieu, connects to other closely related ideas that enhance understanding and entice further curiosity, has toothsomely satisfying length and depth. It's hard to escape DFW even without actually ever reading him, he's just been that much of a modern literary titan...many know *of* Infinite Jest without having read it. Having only read Consider The Lobster myself, I don't have a particular craving for David's more goliath works, but Total Party Kill certainly sounds like an interesting book. Perhaps I'll pick it up after hacking through Joyce's Ulysses. Do think the overarching morals would have served me well in idiot-youth days...you really can get quite far in the modern world by Just Showing Up, reliably punching in and out, sticking with the tedious instead of chasing ephemeral glory, bringing the receipts. But, importantly, this path relies on a critical mass of other people *not* following said staid advice, of having enough faffing-about to rise above without heroic efforts. Doing what would have been banally unremarkable in the past isn't exceptional unless the present is exceptionally unimpressive. (And actual heroic efforts are rewarded, not consummately exactly, but People Do Notice anyway. It's continually amazing to my Lawful alignment how many rules people are willing to bend to keep a black swan worker happy.)
Did find the scattered leftist apologia offputting (it's hard to truly leave the radical left, I guess), although it's a bit hard to disambiguate between views of the reviewer vs views of DFW. I'll also continue to bet long on Barthes: an author contains their collected works, but the collected works don't (fully) contain the author, and very frequently evolve new facets in their own right as readers interact. Any doujin fan feels this instinctively in their bones! Anyway, here's at least one we can very confidently say wasn't authored by Scott, unless everything I know about her is deeply incorrect...
Who on earth would want to read Joyce's Ullysses these days? I gather it comprises a studiously banal account of some non-entity wandering around a city chatting with other equally boring acquaintances. It is also littered with weird word plays, which to me betoken little less than a disordered mind, and jokes maybe once topical but long since receded into total obscurity.
Give me a proper novel any day, such as Moonfleet, or Lorna Doone, or an excellent one I bought in a thrift shop and read only last week, Viking Fire, by Justin Hill, about the life of Harald Hardrada.
Ah, it's a long-running masochistic bet with an old friend of mine. They struggled heroically to read Ulysses for years and failed, and have now bequeathed the accursed book to me. Normally you're right, I wouldn't bother with such intentional obtusity...had more than enough of that for a lifetime raking through House of Leaves. If I actually wanted to pick up an...ambitious...book for intentional reading, it'd be Sadly, Porn, which I am sad didn't make finalist status for the contest this year.
This was my favourite of the 20+ reviews I read, and I'm very happy it made it to the finals!
To the author: some friends and I started a book club to tackle IJ together, and had so much fun with it we never stopped (and recently started publishing the audio of our meetings as a podcast). We'd be thrilled if you joined us to discuss the Pale King, or perhaps a favourite short story? Hit me up if you're interested—we can preserve anonymity until after the contest ends (or forever if you prefer).
As a DFW fan it has been an interesting exercise to figure out where I think he goes wrong, both on the page and off of it. We get into some criticism of his writing in this Brief Interviews discussion: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WXxwTuoxgKaXxGMvK3UBe
>"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention."
This is the sort of quote that persuades me that I wouldn't enjoy reading DFW, who I've never tried. This seems like the kind of perspective that probably seems insightful if you're cynical and depressed, like DFW was, but seems boring if you're not.
In these coments I keep speed-reading "pomo" as "por no". This is slightly confusing, as the reviewer never mentioned that Wallace's epic novels contained any saucy pictures! :-)
I would say that the extract essentially expresses how Buddhism defines Dukkha, one of its central concepts. This idea, almost as old as civilization itself, is considered important enough to be at the heart of one of the most widely followed belief systems.
I don’t consider myself a ‘depressed person’, but the fact that some people find this particular version of Dukkha alien and unrelatable never ceases to surprise me. I guess, like everything else in life, our default neurochemistry exists within a spectrum, and some people really won the genetic lottery of being happy by default, without having to work or think much for it. I suppose I’m envious. Even if not depressed, I do have to combat the Dukkha—or however you want to call it—on a daily basis, and avoiding ending up resorting to, let’s say, unvirtuous ways, is sometimes a true challenge.
I consider myself pretty un-depressed, so I read fantasy and science fiction almost exclusively. Most of it fits me, because it either focuses on mechanical/scientific problems (like Andy Weir's books, or Neal Stephenson's), or on solving people's problems in positive ways (Becky Chambers' and Nathan Lowell's books).
Somewhat related rant:
This I discovered in school: I absolutely hate Russian classic literature, because nothing ever gets solved in it. It's all about exemplifying a problem and then leaving the reader without any positive examples or possible paths to a solution. "Everything sucks and then you die" is not an uncharitable description. You're supposed to learn something from those books in school, or so adults say to children, but I always wondered what I was to learn. It's like providing a neural network with only negative examples. It can't possibly work. So I fell in love with classic American sci-fi, because characters in it Solved Problems. With blaster or brains, it doesn't matter. Of course, Golden Age sci-fi is a bit short on people's problems, and is more concerned with broken spaceship engines or invading aliens, so its lessons aren't directly applicable in real life, but at least it teaches you that solutions ARE possible for almost every situation, and you should seek them instead of sitting on your ass and feeling sorry for yourself. Not the worst lesson, I think! And well, newer sci-fi deals with people, too. Of course, fiction books don't always present you with clear instructions on fixing problems: often, the long and painful period of actually searching for solution is skipped, and the hero just gets a brilliant idea in the nick of time, which is very unrealistic, and can maybe make one feel a bit dumb, because he can never ever approach cleverness of book heroes (while stupidity of classic literature heroes is very relatable for many). Still, it's better than nothing in my opinion.
Gods, even just halfway through this, and my reaction is that we’re so lucky to get to read writing this thoughtful. The way the author slips in pieces of her background — like Easter eggs in the dishwasher — is a delight.
The idea that great wickedness and great virtue coexisting within the same heart constitutes a "contradiction" is an artifact of lazy thinking - modeling people as simplified objects with unitary moral valence. When the mind is considered as a collection of subsystems, it seems obvious that stronger-than-average antisocial urges, plus desire to avoid negative consequences thereof, plus basic self-awareness and ability to plan more than one step ahead, leads naturally to deliberate cultivation and analysis of virtue, with a cognitive budget generous enough (due to the stakes) that the project soon takes on a life of its own and produces insights which can generalize to be usefully shared with others.
Relevant traditional saying is "there's no saint with half the zeal of a reformed sinner."
Indeed. Only *some* of those hard-earned insights actually generalize, and excessive zeal plus "typical mind fallacy" isn't particularly compatible with checking which do or don't.
Is there actually evidence that Wallace did reform though? Your argument that someone with a particularly high level of temptation to do bad things might put a lot of thought into how to do good instead makes sense, but if someone does bad things, that's also evidence that their ideas on how to do good don't work well. If doing good follows from a combination of natural inclination and good ideas, I'd expect that the quality of someone's thoughts on morality and the morality of their actions to be positively correlated overall.
Somebody who builds a dam across a deep canyon probably ends up knowing more about making stone structures sturdy and waterproof than somebody who builds an equivalent-sized pyramid in the desert, but a masterfully sealed dam may still be more prone to catastrophic failure than a mediocre pyramid, since the pyramid doesn't have that original river to worry about.
I don't think the metaphor really adds anything that wasn't already explained more plainly, but going with the metaphor anyway, we can't actually see how big the canyon is (see his intrinsic character). We're just sitting downstream, reading Wallace's thoughts on concrete recipes and stuff, and occasionally experiencing floods when whatever it is he's building fails. In that scenario I'd still be disinclined to take his advice, for the same reason.
There are plenty of other rivers that don't flood, and sure some of them might just be easy to build on, but without knowing which those are, I'd think the non-flooding rivers are still a better place to look for competent engineers.
Actually, following the metaphor that far isn't even right, because loads of places aren't large rivers, but everyone has at least some harmful desires.
Hmm, this isn't really that important to the review. But I played Ultimate competitively for several years in college, and casually for several more years afterward, and no one ever mentioned David Foster Wallace.
It probably was at the colleges Deirdre Coyle (the originator of the frisbee quote) and her friends went to, which makes it a reference all of them would recognize. One of the things about the loss of mass culture is there are lots of obscure signifiers nobody recognizes in any piece of writing coming from a different social group. (I still scratch my head about some of the references on here from time to time.)
I did go through the list of books all white men have and am thinking about using it as a reading guide. (I've read a few, of course.)
Loved this one. I feel that what Wallace tries to discuss is indeed so hard to put into words, that we should all value more what he was trying to do there.
I would also like to recommend to anyone interested in the themes discussed in the review his essay, ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,’ in which he explores how Dostoevsky’s works continue to be relevant. They address universal human concerns—particularly the conflicts between belief and non-belief, the individual versus society, and the problem of evil—in a way which I’m unable to do justice to in this comment.
Isn't the problem of evil only an issue for people who believe in a benevolent omnipotent god, and therefore not a universal human concern? Or do you mean something different by "problem of evil"?
It sounds like Wallace was another example of the perils of having a pair of super-intelligent parents. Like Virginia Woolf, his mental inheritance besides literary talent seemed to be hyper-sensitivity and hyper-awareness along with fits of depression, so much so that both ended up topping themselves.
Disliking mannered and contrived prose, I've always tried to avoid post-modern fiction, and one thing I learned from the review is that this prose style is deliberate. But why is it considered commendable for an author to let verbal and stylistic artifice get in the way of their story? I'd be the first to agree though that I'm a hopeless literary Philistine!
people like the prose style a lot, it’s fun and gives a lot of space for interesting writing. highbrow-lowbrow contrast starts to seem dated these days but the basic structure still works for people. also people really enjoy interacting with complex footnotes (see “House of Leaves”, a commercially successful book that’s still selling to this day)
It's funny, because I sometimes find it annoying when story gets in the way of style. Like when instead of racking up yet another hypersensitive observation or metaphor that I couldn't have come up with in a hundred years, some brilliant writer has to devote entire paragraphs to schlepping a character over here, and another over there, and contriving some tiresome event that has to follow logically, I guess, from whatever preceded it. Sure, they still manage to make the structural stuff look good, but then you realise those bits are no longer all about the voice and feel sad.
I don't think the reverse of this is philistinism, though. And I wonder if the two positions wouldn't find common ground in something like Flaubert's realism.
I’ll just throw out one more bit of Infinite Jest (possibly apocryphal) trivia here. I don’t recall where I read this but the story goes that Wallace and Jonathon Franzen were hanging out and ‘in their cups’ discussing the ending of IJ. Wallace always insisted that the abrupt finish was intentional and the savvy reader would understand the intended meaning
According to the anecdote, a somewhat inebriated Wallace told Franzen that he just didn’t know how to end the novel
I wasn’t one of the savvy readers who knew the precise intended meaning but I also didn’t leave the book dissatisfied. I found it more enjoyable on the years later second reading.
Am I the one who's always been struck by *coffee table* incident? When he got mad and violently threw something at her, it wasn't the remote or a cup or something, he didn't *pick up an end table* and throw that at her, he threw *the coffee table* at her. What is he, Superman? Why not throw the couch at her? Maybe the fridge?
Vaguely reminds me of the story of the Duke lacrosse kids where the presumed victim was supposedly thrown through a glass table that should have killed them. Nobody bothered to question it because they didn't want to be seen as interfering with women's being believed when things happen to them.
Thank you for this review. I started it with a bit of a flinch-- I'm not very interested in DFW and some of the book reviews have been chores-- then I found myself actually wanting to read it.
As for a return to sincerity, have an approximately Chesterton quote: Seeing through everything is indistinguishable from being totally blind.
I remember the Samuel Johnson formulation from time to time and I can say it doesn’t get less true with age, at least so far: “Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her”.
I've read a lot of DFW commentary, read a few of his short works, and tried to read some of the longer stuff (including the Pale King). So while what I'm going to say may sound like a jerk, I mean it to be constructive. And it does all tie together thought it seems to start off on a tangent.
So what I have to say is that, IMHO, DFW shows the limitations of art and a certain type of lifestyle.
Ultimately DFW is unhappy, and his art reflects that unhappiness, because he insists that life should be lived as an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic life is the 20th/21st C version of the religious life. It's the life that judges everything and everyone by whether they meet my particular *aesthetic* criteria. The essence of the aesthetic stance is not exactly artistic so much as judgmental, to have a (mostly negative) opinion about everything, and an opinion based essentially on vibes and appearances, not on details like history, or what the people affected think, or whether what's seen actually "works" in some sense.
Why is this so destructive?
In the first place it allows for no empathy. An empathic person can understand that, even though I'm not much interested in working on a farm (or as a doctor, or in an IRS office, or...) I have plenty of evidence to indicate that many other people are so interested. But it's very hard to imagine that other people have different *aesthetic* preferences than me: if I see something as ugly, I can't really believe that someone else sees it as beautiful – or simply doesn't even care.
In the second place, the aesthetic life if the imposition of the choices of the rich on the poor. NIMBYism is an obvious version of this, but honestly every aspect of life in the US in 2024 is about enforcing aesthetic choices that (what a surprise) meet the desires of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. You can see this starkly when you visit an alternative society; China is a good choice, but I suspect the same would be visible in India. What you see in these countries is material infrastructure – power lines, tunnels, bridges, housing, etc – that, sure, isn't beautiful, certainly that wouldn't be buildable in the US; but it is *functional* and it's a lot better than what was (or wasn't) present earlier. In rich China this is no longer obvious, but go to poor China, eg Tibet or Sichuan province outside Chongqing, and you'll see the contrast side by side – the stuff that was available till a few years ago and the new stuff. The choice to prioritize aesthetics is the choice to prioritize how *I* (a person rich enough that aesthetics are my dominant priority) feel over how actually poor people feel...
In the third place, the aesthetic life is the life of judgement, unending judgement. And since most people (even people who also prioritize aesthetics) have different tastes from you, it's also the life of unending unhappiness. The sensible person looks at the supposed consumer lifestyle and says "great, more goodies for me, all very cheap"; the aesthete says "these people are living life WRONG!!! And somehow that's enough of my concern that I need to be constantly miserable about it".
I think I've said enough that you can now situate DFW in the argument I am making, whether you have read all his works or just this review. DFW, for example, does not look at the IRS office and think "There are people who choose a life of accountancy and find it fascinating; let me see if I can understand their excitement"; no his stance is "I would hate to be an accountant, therefore everyone how is an accountant must be miserable, therefore I will be miserable on their behalf". You see something similar wrt to farming. One of the most interest elements to Paul Theroux's travelogue _ Deep South_ is how many old black people told him they had enjoyed working as agricultural laborers back in their youth and they wished those sorts of jobs still existed as part of their worlds. A similar version of this is how the US has settled on a narrative that certain (very few) jobs are 'good" jobs, and everything else is by implication garbage (as are its practitioners).
The aesthetic stance is no way to live a life. It's a recipe for making yourself miserable, along with everyone else around you. And yet it is the dominant "intellectual" stance in the West, it's how we are taught to live in school and then college. It provides no meaning, no satisfaction, no joy; it's the penultimate step before nihilism.
Alternative of course exist. The religious life is one. The life of service (genuine service, where the goal is to help people, not gather statistics to be used to criticize the world) is another. The STEM life, in various forms, is a third.
DFW was smart enough to see the vapidity of most of the Postmodern stance. What he was not smart enough was to see that all he was rejecting was "level one" of the Postmodern stance, while he should have been rejecting also the deeper substrate, the Aesthetic stance. You can't "This is water" your way out of a defective and deficient world view if literally every person around you holds that same defective and deficient world view. If DFW had been more of an interviewer, more interested in learning how other people think, rather than telling them how they should think, more John MacPhee going out and talking to scientists or farm laborers or athletes, things could have turned out very differently.
Obviously what I'm describing is a generic Western pathology, responsible for most of our current misery. But there's no point in me expanding on that, you can easily do so yourself...
I guess I'd rate myself as an ex-aesthete in this way, though I might have along to a kind of happy nihilism. That's an ok place. I don't need the world to make meaning for me, but I wish well to all who sail in her, and I'll contribute to that. It's interesting that you mentioned the STEM life because I expect I'd be more bewildered and clutching without it. The religious bemoan their population's loss of God and descent into animal spirits, I feel something similar about the risk of living in worlds of ideas, ungrounded by science, given over to whatever stories come along.
>But it's very hard to imagine that other people have different _aesthetic_ preferences than me
Hmm... I have aesthetic preferences, but I view them as deeply arbitrary. I would no more expect someone else to share my aesthetic preferences than I would expect them to share my flavor preferences.
Yeah I agree, but I think it's possible that many people do not think like that. I certainly know some people who are unable to make that distinction (between subjective aesthetic preferences and objective reality). I don't know what kind of proportions exist in the population.
How often do you see listicles like "The ten best cities to live in". Do you think production or consumption of these lists is healthy? You think it doesn't affect people (all negatively) that 100 years ago Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Toledo and St Louis were all considered fine places to live and now they're considered places to be ashamed to be from?
How about the discussion around "McMansions"? Is that healthy? Is that engaged in with a spirit of "well, opinions may differ" or something substantially more controlling and domineering?
Similarly the discussion around traffic, or around architecture, or around "good" jobs.
All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
Like I said: "This is water". You don't even realize how pervasive this mindset is, and how it is NOT UNIVERSAL, it's a particular pathology of the West right now.
Pretty much the only people who see it as pathology are those who grew up elsewhere or have deep relationships with people who grew up elsewhere, people whose response to a list in the NYT of "Ten Best Restaurants in Manhattan" is "that's an insane thing to appear in a NEWSPAPER" not "ooh, let's see which ones I've been to"...
>people whose response to a list in the NYT of "Ten Best Restaurants in Manhattan" is "that's an insane thing to appear in a NEWSPAPER"
I agree that it is an insane thing to appear in a newspaper. Many Thanks!
Some of the other ones, not quite so much. There are some objective measures for cities, for instance: crime rate, median salary, median home price, ... and the direction of preference for these is pretty widely agreed on, though the relative _weights_ will be subjective. There are, of course, other factors, e.g. warm vs cool weather, where the _direction_ of preference will differ from person to person.
>All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
That sounds menacingly similar to political correctness... Is this mostly a Woke thing?
Obsessing over what I am describing as "Woke" is, once again, to miss the point.
I'm describing a general pathology in human social behavior. Responding by saying "that's what THAT tribe does, not my tribe" (or the equivalent "that sounds like a criticism of my tribe, therefore it can't be right") is a deliberate choice to be more stupid.
I think it was Paul Graham who said something like "every word you add to your identity reduces your IQ by ten points". Part of what we are seeing in these comments is that quotation playing out in real life.
Re Hans Rosling - I haven't read his book, but I really enjoyed some of his presentations. He can really make data shine!
>I think it was Paul Graham who said something like "every word you add to your identity reduces your IQ by ten points".
It is reasonable advice, Many Thanks! ( More precisely, words one adds to one's identity that one has an emotional investment in. I "am", so to speak, a AAA member, with an investment equal to my membership fee - in expectation that if my car fails on the road, they will send someone to tow me. Strictly quid-pro-quo. )
Re:
>All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
and re
>a _general_ pathology in human social behavior.
[emphasis added]
There are at least two fairly different ways that "one correct opinion" can happen:
- There can be competitions to be stylishly "up to date" - keeping track of the fashionable clothing, music, colors, names, perfumes etc. E.g. the rise and fall of bell bottoms.
- There can be pressure to be politically in synch with the current ideology/language. E.g. the way the polite term for blacks gets changed about every decade or so.
- I think that there are probably other, equally distinct, versions as well. _Possibly_ fads in technologies. _Possibly_ fads in medical treatments.
Of the first two, both are ridiculously constrictive, but I think that these occur in different groups, with different enforcement mechanisms. For the latter, I do think some of the best examples are associated with the Woke, though there are certainly other groups that have done and do analogous things.
The reason I mentioned him is not the sort of thing you are probably thinking of. Yes, he's good at presenting data that people should know, but don't. But if there's one single message in his last book, _Factfulness_, it's that you have a big problem when the people reporting an issue are the same people who benefit from funding that issue.
It doesn't matter if the issue is US school results, or vaccination rates in Africa, or homelessness or drug abuse, or whatever. Human nature is simply such that people are EXTREMELY reluctant to ever admit that an issue that they made a big deal about is now solved, or at least much less of a problem. Whether it's that they would lose a job, or they rationalize that they're still helping people, or they internally redefine the problem, the issue never goes away, never improves. And so you simply cannot trust these people.
The issue is not that they are "publicizing a good cause" it is "trust but verify". And the entire book is basically one long depressing sequence of cases where verification was, in fact very very different from the claims of the do-gooders.
This is a general point. Just as, whenever you see a political story that seems mighty convenient for the side that are publicizing and your first thought should be "but is it actually true, as described and claimed", so whenever you hear about some social issue your first question should be "who is making these claims of such misery, and what are their incentives; in other words why should I trust them?"
And are you sure that the religious life, whose replacement you allege, allows for the kind of pluralistic empathy you see as missing from the aesthetic life? If there ever were an archetype of judgement and exclusion...
Only a dunce thinks their taste is absolute. If anything, the known arbitrariness of aesthetic judgement is what lets it coexist with alternatives, in the way that religious creeds and moral systems don't. If your friend gets excited about the wrong writer, you roll your eyes and think he's an idiot. If he gets excited about the wrong god, you avert your eyes and think he's a heretic.
That's not to say you're wrong about some people trying to create artificial aristocracies of taste, or about the money-taint of the whole thing, but strong counter-cultures form and thrive. And the artistic life, done right, is a life of service no less self-effacing than any missionary vocation. Whatever you want to say about DFW, he wasn't doing it for clout or money. He was writing, in the way he was, because he clearly couldn't help himself.
Perhaps the biggest difference I see in classical art and modern art is that quite a bit of classical art moves me towards something. I like the pieces that move me towards something better, like kindness or curiosity.
Modern art lacks that. It's pure aesthetic. It seems in conversation with itself and divorced from any knowable reality.
Much if the discourse I see online is purely aesthetic too. Probably the one that rustled my jimmies the most is about how we live in a dystopian future. Someone posts a photo of a robotic dog and others simply comment how this is yet more proof we live in a dystopian cyberpunk world of all powerful corporations where everyone else is a wage slave. There is no connection to reality, to nuance, no counter examples. It's purely aesthetic.
I concur that there's a cancer eating away people's ability to interface with reality. I'm not sure how much of it is tied with DFW--the review makes it sound like he was aware of this problem and was trying to find a way past it.
“I think I've said enough that you can now situate DFW in the argument I am making, whether you have read all his works or just this review. DFW, for example, does not look at the IRS office and think "There are people who choose a life of accountancy and find it fascinating; let me see if I can understand their excitement"; no his stance is "I would hate to be an accountant, therefore everyone how is an accountant must be miserable, therefore I will be miserable on their behalf".”
This doesn’t strike me as being true of DFW. I don’t think you have a handle on him yet.
Come on! It's true of the Pale King, it's true of A Supposedly Fun Thing, it's true of Brief Interviews.
Maybe I am a stupid reader, but what I take away from all of them is contempt mixed with misunderstanding, ie judgement unleavened by a serious attempt to understand.
Compare with, say, Chuck Klosterman. You can imagine Chuck Klosterman tackling the same material – but with a very different (and IMHO far healthier) tone.
"judgement unleavened by a serious attempt to understand"
This is nearly the exact opposite of Wallace's attitude and the problem his telos seeks to undo. I think every person I have spoken to who likes Wallace gets his deep drive to understand and empathize with others, to pay close attention to the currents of life going unseen, even when it is difficult, repugnant, boring, inconvenient. It's weird to me that you have read him and concluded that he is actually striving for the exact opposite of his stated goals, and that you think he's an aesthete—like, *Wilde* is an aesthete: Wallace is, again, the opposite.
He certainly failed in being able to navigate the world, and there are certainly problems with his worldview (for one, it is far too idealistic about what one can achieve through pure emotional labor), but I think you have targeted PoMo correctly and incorrectly identified Wallace as some sort of champion of its worldview rather than somebody doing a decent good job of struggling out of its confines.
He didn't make it all the way to actual Christianity, but the idea that Wallace is not a religious writer lacks insight—and the dude, apparently, very quietly attended church regularly. So again—you're trying to get a round peg into the square hole of your argument. You don't have a handle on him.
I think this is one of these things where, if you approach an artist from one direction you stress X, whereas if you approach from a different direction you stress ~X.
Look at "This is Water". DFW sorta understands that he thinks this way, and that it is destructive: The middle section that ends with "If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience ..."
He does what you claim he's doing with the next paragraph about "’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him...", you score that as "he's showing empathy".
But none of that is my point. My point is go back a few paragraphs, to
"Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
"
Look at that. That's exactly what I'm talking about. He kinda knows that he is being 15 ways of judgmental here, he kinda knows that he is egging on a crowd that will engage in exactly the same sort of judgmentalism – and yet he can't stop himself. He's willing to kinda sorta concede well maybe an individual act by some person was done for some reason, but no more than that. Consumerism is TERRIBLE (citation not required) Hummers are TERRIBLE (citation not required)
Look at the flow from the red meat to the "you need to think". It's NOT "you need to think why are you so AUTOMATICALLY against cars and suburbia and products and the rest of it", the furthest he goes is "you need to think that even though the guy driving the hummer is OBVIOUSLY an a-hole, maybe on this ONE occasion he actually had a good reason to cut you off".
He's willing, as I see it, to concede that some people's ACTs can be understood by empathy, but he's not willing to concede that some people JUST ARE HAPPY TO LIVE DIFFERENT LIVES DRIVEN BY DIFFERENT MOTIVATIONS.
Look at a sentence like "you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. " I mean, yes, I'm glad you're willing to concede the lack of sleep part, but WTF do we need the fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up part?
You see him as trying to steer these kids away from the worst snap judgements of their schooling. And yes, that's certainly better than nothing.
But I see this, as I phrased it, simply as "level 1". He's still trapped in seeing people different from himself, making choices different from his choices, and reflexively thinking "NO. WRONG! Goddamnit, live life the way I want you to."
That's what *I* am trying to stress, as what I am calling the "aesthetic" life.
Ironically the social-justice thing is sort of a combo of the religious and service life, seeking to improve the world in service of the cause/religion.
Yes, there has always been an element of the religious life that's primarily about judging others, but the religious life as understood by people sympathetic to it, and the life of service, are NOT primarily about judging others.
If you believe that SJW is actually about improving the world, not about the analysis I gave above, well, I'm sorry, but we are on opposite teams. You're like the guy who sidles up to me after I defend some conservative economic position and says "yeah, you're right; now about those queers". Sorry about that!
But hey, read what I said, think about it, look at what SJW's actually DO (not what they say, what they do, and don't do, and how often they change their ideas in response to evidence). Maybe in a few years you'll see my point.
Both the religious life, and the SJW 'religious' life, draw from a mix of selfish motivations (judging others, getting to persecute others) and unselfish motivations (serving God, helping others). Most movements have a mix of motivations or they wouldn't be as successful as they are. Priests were among the few Spaniards fighting against the conquistadors' persecutions of the Indians; they staffed hospitals and educated children. Cardinals built palaces for themselves from the faithful's gold. It's rare any movement is all-good or all-bad.
I do think a lot of SJWs genuinely want to improve the world. That they wind up doing the opposite in practice is just another inconvenient thing solved by convincing themselves that what they're doing is actually good...just as Christians in the past convinced themselves that they were saving the souls of the Indians or slaves or whoever. How often do religious people change their ideas in response to evidence?
Of course, plenty of SJWs desist and change their minds.
The only difference (in my opinion anyway) is 'by their fruits shall ye know them'; religion worked pretty well for thousands of years, Marxism and modern social justice, not so much.
I always feel weird when DFW is mentioned. First, I knew his father—he was one of my professors in graduate school. A favorable review of “Broom of the System” was displayed proudly on his office door. Second, DFW took his own life the same weekend my son took his.
That’s a cruel reminder. There are some wounds that never fully heal and I’m sure that your loss is one of them. I know the words of a random internet stranger don’t amount to much but, for whatever they are worth, you have my sympathies.
I wonder about MAOIs and their potential for resurgance. You note that they can be very effective, but fell out of favor because of their diet related issues. The dietary issues stem, in part, from our insistence on long lasting MAOIs which irreversibly poison MAO. But there are shorter acting MAOIs which reversibly interfere with MAO. Perhaps they could be used more, and then people could have their cheese in the evenings.
Insert the correct word:“The really important kind of (BIG WORD) involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” - a) Love b) Life c) Dedication d) ...
Putting "freedom" instead, is a) plain wrong b) manipulation c) profound d) ... .
It started like a great review - for a moment I even thought: Is it Scott? (now I guess it's an ol' friend of his). But then came pseudo-intellectual overloaded word-clusters as in "resurgence of doctrinaire political ideology" (isn't 'doctrinaire political ideology' tautological pleonasm, hence redundant?*).
Scott may do a sentence as "The Pale King is in many ways arguing ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day". But not a monstrous: "The Pale King is in many ways revanchist, arguing for reclamation of territory lost to hedonism in the name of old-fashioned ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day "
*yep. Any "intellectual", even me, can do three tricky words instead of one. The good ones avoid it. cuz a) pretentious and b) smoke-grenading the reader.
It's not the greatest word cluster in the world, but it makes the point--people are really getting into social justice, Marxism, Trumpism, and neofascism, and DFW didn't predict that.
I am old. I see no change in how much "people" are getting into "social justice", never as popular a topic as the NYT believes it to be. There were some Marxists before 1989, after: it is mostly fake (and a few fall into that hole as ever). Trumpism is not an even an ideology - and surely not a "doctrine". As being fangirl of JFK or Brandt was no ideology. "Neofascism" in its widest sense has merely become more visible - similar to foot-fetishism. - Sure, media loves to paint 1968 as a peak of political interest - my parents then could not have cared much less about Woodstock/Nam/ ... but had political convictions all the same.
A retreat from postmodern ideals would undoubtedly improve some of the unsavory superficial aspects of modern society, but it's halmark minimalism is something I actually lean toward. I wear minimalist clothing, I write minimalist code, and generally err on the side of minimalism with most things within my control.
I've actually said repeatedly that minimalism is always best.
Now I hear that this is a frodulant statement! I probably won't change, but my code might get a little more abstract.
Postmodernism is not about minimalism. Like any large idea (especially one that's been put to many political purposes) it means many different things, some of them contradictory, some of them rather insightful, most of them destructive and/or stupid.
One very uninteresting strand starts with the claim that every human relationship whatsoever is about nothing but power, and goes downhill from there.
Another strand was somewhat referenced in the review, the claim that people (and especially "us moderns") live so much in language that it is language, not reality, that defines our worlds. The somewhat reasonable mild version of this likewise soon veers off into insanity, with claims like "quarks are invented" and similar, the sort of nonsense that got Alan Sokal so riled up.
The one element that is actually (IMHO) both actually true and actually interesting (saying something valuable and non-obvious) is discussed in unending detail by David Chapman at https://meaningness.com/#contents
You probably don't want to read the whole thing! But in small doses it's very interesting. His point briefly summarized is that MODERNITY is defined not just by rationality but by a very specific implementation of "rationality". Modernity, as in post-Newtonian physics, then a century or so later chemistry, then eventually biology, is about
- starting with a set of "obviously true" axioms about you field of interest then
- deducing logically consequences from those axioms.
This gets us an awful lot, including, for example, analysis and calculus up to about 1850, or physics up to about 1890. BUT it's not the end of the story. Because, like it or not, the actual axioms required to understand the world (whether the math of Cantor, or QM and relativity) are in fact not "obviously true". Something more is needed, a level of creativity and daring beyond what was imagined by people who put together the classical Modernist paradigm during "The Enlightenment".
Chapman's shpiel is one (very very) extended riff on this point - ways of thinking before Enlightenment/Modernity, ways we should think after Enlightenment/Modernity, how Postmodernism began with something useful to say on these issues but soon got derailed by people who were unwilling (or too stupid) to understand that you cannot useful critique Rationality until you've actually executed it in your head for at least a few years, how all these stances affect culture, etc etc.
This is not an orthodox "definition/analysis" of postmodernism. But it is an actually useful one!
Not strictly relevant, but: boy, do I truly, truly, with all my heart & soul, blackly & bitterly: fuckin' *hate* Chapman's writings on Buddhism.
I don't think anyone could so completely miss the point, toss the baby out with prejudice & keep every drop of the bathwater, go down the up escalator (and also it's a Chinese escalator), and generally somehow manage to pick the worst possible set of interpretations, practices, & conclusions it's possible to pick*...
...if they'd /set out/ to see "how horribly can I pervert the useful parts of Buddhism so as to create a sort of similarly-worthless(-but-even-uglier) Western mirror image of the intellectually-bankrupt Pure Land varieties? maybe make it philosophically & spiritually bankrupt too? now there's an idea!--"... and then //proceeded to do just exactly that.//
Gah.
...y'know, I've never really articulated it, heretofore. Maybe I should write an essay about it.
.
.
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*(well, in my personal opinion, obviously. may be slightly exaggerated. it's been a while; I just remember being appalled, with near-mortal blows dealt first to my pedant's soul, & then to my philosophical heart; and if I've any tiny, malformed nub that was meant to be my third eye of spirituality, he poked a finger right in its sensitive ectoplasmic jelly, too.)
Certainly right now I have no idea what your complaints are and if they are basically “David made fun of MY Buddhism — which is basically Unitarianism Lite, ala Lisa Simpson and Richard Gere”, some bizarre issue of technical doctrine of no interest to anyone outside Buddhism [cf Christology disputes], or something more substantial…
It's... probably closer to #2, heh: not of great relevance unless one is a practitioner or has an academic interest in the topic, and (as far as I know) my view is very much in the minority, outside of some 14th-century Sakyapa & Gelukpa monks.
Now, 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 fellows had their heads on straight.
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[I.e.: if I DO write an essay on it, probably the only engagement I will receive is angry comments from fans of the "Crazy Wisdom" guy ("Chsomething Trungpa"?)--because the thing I'll be attacking is very much the more popular sort of interpretation online (and that variety in particular is--surprisingly, to me--quite numerous)...
...unless... 𝘶𝘯𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 I'll have tapped into a hidden wellspring of fellow-feeling among other reactionary Buddhist pedanto-elitists, making my fame and fortune?
Yes... yes! I've got a lucky feelin'!--]
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I probably do need to make it an entire Thing to articulate it in any kind of convincing way--and I certainly need to refresh my memory of what Chapman actually wrote; I may be attacking a ghost (widely considered to be a bad idea)--so please forgive me if I just sort of gesture unconvincingly at some concepts, like a bad improv actor.
(I will make a solemn vow, here & now, however: if people give me money, I will return to make it actually persuasive & erudite. 𝘔𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘵.)
Anyway, I'll write the following as if you're not a Buddhist; pardon if you are & it's all just review for you!
So. Essentially: a long, long time ago, in a land far, far away...
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...there was a brilliant & handsome North Indian mahapandita & mahasiddha, an individual well-versed in the Dharma, to whom it fell to defend the Truth from the depredations of a Chinese heretic.
You see, Buddhism was flowering in Tibet, but along with the pure nectar of Sanskrit teachings came a foul effluence from the East: Heshang Moheyan's seductive words, telling the Sangha it was time to lay down the burden of 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵 & 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 & 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦... why, just stop thinking, and boom! You're already Enlightened! Don't even bother to keep the Precepts, ha-ha!
...okay, maybe that wasn't 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 what he taught. The crux of it, anyway, was a battle between the Indian presentation of the Way--gradual attainment, with deep contemplation & vinaya rules & study of an enormous body of texts--with a burgeoning Chinese presentation of "direct" or "sudden" attainment of Unbinding.
Kamasila, it is told, journeyed to Samye, or maybe Lhasa, and there defeated Heshang or a representative thereof in debate--and so Vajrayana became firmly Gradualist in orientation.
So, in the "gradual" vs. "sudden" enlightenment debate, the former has been by far the majority view, outside of China & Japan. Southeast Asian (Theravadin) Buddhism, Indian (Sarvastivadin / Sautrantikan / Mahayanist) Buddhism (when it still existed), and--as said--Tibetan Vajrayanist Buddhism all subscribe to it.
...officially. (𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥, 𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺)
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In a horrible episode--good movie fare, IMO: "Tʜᴇ Sᴜʙɪᴛɪᴛᴇ Rᴇᴛᴜʀɴs!"--it seems that the wily (Wylie)* Tibetans actually sort of... gradually (heh heh) snuck the "sudden way" back in, 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵.
It's one of those things where a particular formulation has become verboten, so proponents have an Officially Totally Different way of putting things... that amounts to the same thing in practice; hence, you end up with (particularly Nyingmapa & Kagyupa) luminaries such as Tsewang Norbu starting treatises off by roundly damning that Chan perversion of subitism...
...and then going on to explain that Mahamudra or Dzogchen are 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵, are distinct in 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 from the mere "cessation of concepts" (mitokpa/misampa) that the misguided Chan teachers tried to corrupt our good Tibetan lads with--but are 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘶𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 & 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 "𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘶𝘢𝘭" 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.
(This is an oversimplification, of course. These scholars were not dumb, nor ignorant--they had/have many subtle reasons & justifications behind the distinctions they made; I'm just sayin', 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 is how it has ended up that my antisubitist position is the Actual Minority even though it's the Official Majority.)
Anyway, as you might be able to tell (and also, as I just said--), I'm firmly on one side of this divide.
It has gradually (...heh heh) become clear to me that pretty much all of the earliest & most canonical of Buddhist texts--most of the Tengyur, most of the Kangyur (with a few notable exceptions, to be dispensed with when I write the Real Essay), the Pali suttas, and even the Chinese agamas--are very clearly on Kamasila's side, re: the 𝘋𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘢𝘮𝘺𝘦-𝘰𝘳-𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘺-𝘓𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘢.
It has 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 gradually become clear to me that something is rotten in the state of Kham.
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...Look, I know it's pretty arrogant to say "entire groups of people who know way more than I do & with traditions of centuries of scholarship & practice are 𝘵𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨..."
...but, nevertheless, they are. Not my fault I see so much more clearly than m--
--okay, okay, no; I'm not saying that Dzogchen & Mahamudra are worthless, or nothin'. Undoubtedly, they truly do suite some people best, and one of my absolute favorites among all Buddhist thinkers/teachers known to me--Patrul Rinpoche--was himself a big proponent of both.
Nevertheless, as proof-of-concept: consider the Burmese "dry insight" movement & its (only-just-ebbing) popularity in the last century.
Here we have a school of thought which--I believe--almost no serious scholar of Buddhism defends on any grounds other than "well, hey, you do you"; many, many different lines of evidence converge on the proposition "jhana/dhyana was either 𝐚 key component or--quite possibly--𝐓𝐇𝐄 key component of Buddhism, as practiced originally & throughout the vast majority of its history."
And yet, as with the "Unitarianism Lite" sort of Buddhism, here we have a group of people--very many of whom are plenty intelligent, educated, kind, etc.--who ended up grabbing the wrong end of the stick. It happens.
But--that particular stick... er... illness, let's say, was relatively easily diagnosed, & is being cured apace: wasn't dominant in Theravadin tradition (nor even in 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐞 Theravadin history), by any means; had no great antiquity with which to entrench itself; and really hadn't been given much textual support even by its advocates.
It's almost an "historical accident" it even caught on. (Lesi was motivated by political considerations as much as Buddhist ones, I think.)
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Likewise--but worse, by far--I find issue with the presentation of Mahamudra & (esp.) Dzogchen/atiyoga, in the modern West...
...which just 𝙝𝙖𝙙 to be the one that (IIRC) Chapman 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳, didn't it?
Ironically, for all his contempt** toward Lisa-Simpson-milquetoast-Buddhism, I feel like his sort 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 takes the strongest & most "alien-technology"-reminiscent (to steal an idea from Scott) part of Buddhism; and replaces it with a sort of humdrum so-what? piece of machinery, instead.
What do I mean by this? Well, for example, suppose the following supposition:
It just occurred to me that 𝐀.) this is already way too long for something approx. 1 person--who may not even be 𝘺𝘰𝘶...--will find interesting, and 𝐁.) well, if I've written this much, I may as well take it & try to turn it into something a bit more polished...
If anyone 𝙞𝙨 interested, I'll try to finish it within half a day or so.† Cheers.)
Yeah, I'm sorry, as an outsider this very much has the feel of Arianism vs Nicaea or Nestorianism vs Chalcedon, and every bit as utterly uninteresting to anyone not invested in any of those camps...
I've not read DFW and reading this review made me realise why (and it's for reasons similar to those applying to Pynchon and also, and it might even make sense, to Laurence Sterne). I start and initially feel "oh wow this is amazing stuff" and then, fairly quickly (usually about 20% or less in) this initial wonder turns into "nah, no, not really; why???".
The review was similar, though I read more than a third thoroughly and skimmed the rest for information.
So somehow, an enthusiastic report on the book, mimics something about the book, perhaps.
Same. I started off quite fascinated; a third of the way in, I started sort of thinking "yeah but... do I really care tho?"
And the answer, I'm afraid, is: no. But it's a well-done review, from what I've read!
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[& that's not snarky--I mean that. This sort of thing just isn't my cup of tea, I suppose.
Near the beginning, the reviewer mentioned a time period wherein she was feeling lost, not sure what to believe in; there, she categorized, wholesale, some general... what you might call "meaning attractors" or "worldview eddies" or something [Scott's used a word for it before & I can't remember what the hell it was--nothing really obscure, either; argh; like a vibe, but a group, yannowha'amean?]:
"...the Right's like this, but also like this; religion's like this--but then again, religion also does this other thing; the X-ists do like so, but the Y-ians..."
...etc., etc. A rhetorical flourish at least as much as it's meant to be an accurate reflection of that time in the reviewer's life, no doubt--but even so, the basic way of thinking behind it is just... sort of alien, t'me.
I'd have to write an essay of my own to really articulate what I mean, but it's just--as if you read about someone fretting over whether their high-school yearbook quote is still holding up today, 20 years later: you might think, like... "no, you're... you're doing it wrong! that's not what you ought think about; or at least, not /how/ to think about it all!..."
That is, searching for something to "believe in", or doing anything except an eclectic mix-'n'-match obtained by taking one Thing at a time & carefully attempting to work out the fact of the matter--if any--just seems wrong-headed, to me. You don't need to believe in "the Right"; you take the Right's claims as they come, select the right (heh), discard the wrong. Same for all other everything. No anxiety or feeling lost required!
Then again, I've always known exactly who I am & what I should "believe in", since I was just a young lad.* I stole a phrase my ex-wife used recently, in my latest (boring, personal) essay: "Kvel," she said, "you're just so... relentlessly /you/. It's like you were born to be the person you are now--and /have known it the entire time, too./"
"Sweet," I said.
"No! It's bad, because '/you/' in this case has //a lot of really bad ideas & habits!// I'm worried about you, since I left; I didn't know you'd go downhill like thblah blah blah blah" (stopped paying attention about here, because it sounded like she wasn't saying the compliment bit any more; the important part was the beginning, anyway.)
Is this even relevant to the comment I'm replying to any more? What did I start off talking about? Am I consuming too many research chemicals? These are just a few of the questions Man was, perhaps, not really meant to know.
> "meaning attractors" or "worldview eddies" or something [Scott's used a word for it before & I can't remember what the hell it was--nothing really obscure, either; argh; like a vibe, but a group, yannowha'amean?]
"reflective-equilibrium"? "egregore" is also making the rounds, these days. though that one's fairly obscure.
I don’t know how effective of a review this is of The Pale King. But, it was incredibly well written, and introduced me to metamodernism, and verbalized ideas I couldn’t, and channeled Wallace’s own style at the same time. Beautiful review, and probably my pick for the best
Give me the "shallow escapism" (or whatever Wallace called it; quoted near the beginning IIRC) sci-fi & fantasy over DFW's ponderous navel-gazing any day, I say!
The reviewer makes a brief connection between politics and literature. Let me say something here. I am almost entirely innocent to arts or literature, but recently I took an interest, because politics is all about compromise and saying what your audience wants to hear and I think people reveal their true colours more in art.
And I don't like what I am seeing. Before modernism, art was easy to understand. I mean look up the painting Washington crossing the Delaware. It is as easy to grasp as a Spider-Man comic book. You don't have to be educated to get it.
In my mind, modernism, say, Brancusi's bird statue, is entirely about snobbery: the average people will not get it, and they will say they will not get it, so you can separate yourself from the crowd by pretending to get it.
If I am right, art in the 100-120 years is all about separating yourself from the hoi-polloi. You pretend to understand a banan taped to the wall, they won't, and that is the entire purpose of taping a banana to a wall.
And this is alarming to me, because practically all artists and "art fans" are leftists, I am leftist too, I want compassion-based leftism, not superiority-complex based leftism. I want the kind of leftism that wants to make the world a kinder place, not the virtue-signalling or education-signalling kind.
Wasn't really familiar with DFW before reading this and I'm not really going to run out and start reading his stuff now but it definitely jives with my personal brand of the-rebels-are-posers post-postmodernism.
Can't be sure this is my favorite review so far but I look forward to finding out who wrote it so I can go look for other stuff they've written.
“True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer...
...The problem with all this, of course, is that in the middle of writing the book, he killed himself."
Heh. Yeah, that's a problem all right. Am I the only one who sees a striking resemblance between Wallace's "true heroism" and what an author's work life is like?
I think he paints too bleak a picture. Yes, one has to "be the best cog in the machine you can be" because that is what society requires in order to survive, but I don't think that's near enough. Be a good cog, but be more than just that. I think everyone needs a validating activity, something that provides respite in minor ways on a daily basis. Something unique to yourself that other people who know you can appreciate. You want something to remind people of you after you are gone.
Perhaps I am naive, but I find it hard to imagine that someone would seriously plan a murder, abuse a partner, or commit suicide if they were able to creatively express themselves through, say, carpentry.
This is an amazing 'review' that goes way beyond just talking about one book! Amazing. I've read most of Wallace's oeuvre, but have not made it through IJ and have not attempted TPK yet. But I will now. (I have a splendid first edition hardcopy of it). If this doesn't win the best review of the year, I want to see what does! Kudos to the author.
I actually just finished reading Infinite Jest yesterday by chance, and with the benefit of recent memory can say that there are definitely more than 3 female characters; it may be true that there are only a handful really important ones (that being Joelle Van Dyne, Avril Incandenza, and maybe Kate Gompert or Pat Montesian) but half of the tennis academy is composed of girls and many of them are named and have important moments in certain stories, mainly the Eschaton bit. There are also many female members of the Ennett Halfway house. Dozens of female characters really, I could list many of them.
i ( biased that this is best book review considering I have Infinite Jest tattooed on fingers for https://imgur.com/a/Rhi8CEU ) was rereading The Gay (happy kind!) Science by Nietzsche and also half reading this when a lil synchronicity should happen:
> “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit."
was read right before my eyes turned heavenward (down) to book in my lap to read
> A Simile.—Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic orbits, are not the most profound. He who looks into himself, as into an immense universe, and carries Milky Ways in himself, knows also how irregular all Milky Ways are; they lead into the very chaos and labyrinth of existence.
which the whole Stars being stars thing being a motif in his work made me say aloud in the elevator to me pooch Doris who'd went peepee and poopoo
> One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
which I've always thought when hearing the question "why do geniuses kill themselves"... perhaps they are simply psychospiritual irradiating fusion producers who are destined to go suicidally supernova and then collapse into a neutron star, which, because of their gravity, bend light that approaches them or bends readers reading them
> "nested footnotes—that the whole beautiful mess could become self-annihilating. I’ve heard people call his style called both maximalist and masturbatory—and while I lean, always, towards the charitable interpretations of Wallace, I do have to admit that it’s impossible to remain consistently absorbed in his work"
in Infinite Jest he wanted to mirror the constant vacillating back-and-forthèdness any addict will recognize... or a tennis match of course
" ‘It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’"
This very much reads like something that could have been written about any piece of the modern America I've come to know, from the 1920's on. Excepting the Great Depression, of course. It reminds me of a psychic doing a cold read, making generalized guess after guess until they strike a chord.
"In Wallace’s world, postmodernism and consumer culture form a wicked duo, the former reducing reality to discourse, and the latter papering over the resulting emptiness with a carnival of glittering distractions."
Makes Wallace sound like a baroque Thomas Pynchon.
"One of the most moving sections of the book is a 100-page novella smack in the middle, written from the perspective of wastoid¹¹-turned-accountant Chris Fogel. Chris’ 1970s youth was spent in partying and shallow rebellion, once again, papering over a deep emptiness: “I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’”"
In a truly terrifying anecdote, Gibby Haynes of The Butthole Surfers was once Texas Young Accountant Of The Year.
Accounting *student* of the year.
He's Thomas Pynchon with a pole up his ass.
Pynchon with more soul
I'm kind of afraid to read this review and not just skim through, since what I read gave me the feels that I'm going to try *once again* reading Infinite Jest and just giving up somewhere around page 100-200.
Ditto.
Hah, I hit the wall at page 166. Still in my active pile though.
If you can at least white knuckle it to the thermonuclear / tennis match 'Eschaton', it's well worth it. Hell just read that bit, it's pretty well self contained as I recall
Starts at page 323 as I recall
Also, IJ is great as a book club book, I read it that way with about 6 months of semi-regular discussions and it was delightful
Sadly half my book club only does audiobooks which doesn't really work with all the endnotes I don't think.
Sounds like it really doesn't! I guess you'd have two separate tracks or something? https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67589/what-its-record-audiobook-version-infinite-jest
Yeah there might be a way to make it work but it's a hard sell.
Here's a music video of The Decembrists with a live action creation of "Eschaton": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJpfK7l404I
„The uploader has not made this video available in your country“
:(
If you can't finish a novel it's not the novel you need.
This is very true. It comes down to how you happen to be wired at a particular point in your life.
If it’s not working for you, put it down. Maybe in 10, 15 or 20 years it will be the cat’s meow. Or maybe it will always seem dreadful. Some things are just a matter of personal taste and perfectly fine.
also, we will sadly never have the lifespan to read all the books we want to, so reading summaries/reviews/sparknotes is morally acceptable (though, I, personally, will read all the books)
I think a lot of it comes down to whether DFW's sense of humor happens to match your own. I usually tell people that if they're not laughing out loud by the end of the early pot-binge chapter (chapter 2 IIRC?), it may not be worth continuing. If you don't find it funny, _Infinite Jest_ seems like a real slog. There are some really good things about IJ besides the humor, but why spent ages reading a work of fiction that you're not enjoying?
(also I would *never* recommend _The Pale King_ to anyone who doesn't already love DFW; parts of it are *deliberately* a boring slog, as the review author points out. Even for someone who does love him, I'd send them to the essays way before I'd send them to _TPK_.)
I try to encourage people re: Infinite Jest, that around p200 he stops throwing in new characters with scenes and set pieces that may or may not connect to anything else, and starts following people whose names at least you remember.
The introduction of Don Gately about this time is no coincidence; Gately is IMHO one of the greatest characters in literature.
For me the ultimate highlight/set-piece is not Eschaton, but the epic melee in the street at Ennet House, where Don has to confront three huge Canadians ('Nucks) there to kill the resident/cokehead/sociopath who enjoyed killing pets and ~10 mins prior had knifed their dog.
It's a Sam Peckinpaugh breathless flow of both violence and Don's internal POV, combined with a few other "camera-shots" of reactions or actions. It's maybe two paragraps but multiple pages of 8-pt double-justified type with no breaks because that is exactly the psychological way you experience intense events. (*) many many of the sentences and thoughts are indelible, but what elevates the scene is not just the prose but the fact that Don Gately feels a little ashamed that he is "almost jolly" at the prospect of a fight. (Gateley is "...twenty-seven and just huge..." and while he has no idea how he will stay sober one more day (it's been 444 days at this moment), he *definitely* knows how to brawl.)
Wallace said that Gately was loosely based on a real person he met at his first AA meeting, but DG only became a main character as Wallace was writing and realized Don's story was more interesting than Hal (who is basically the author as a young man, mixed with Dostoyefsky and Hamlet and "morbid self-attention" and Tom-Clancy-level Inside Tennis trivia and crap that seems brilliant when you are 25.)
BRetty
* - "It's not that things really slow down they just break into frames...." My best friend was attacked by two armed robbers, in front of his shop at 3:30 on a Tuesday aftn across from a middle school. Having noticed a strange car circling, he had, just <60 seconds before, ducked inside to grab his pistol and tuck it in his waistband.
He told me that the maybe 0.8 seconds while he drew his gun were an eternity, his mind asking over and over, "Am I going to KILL somebody?! Do I have to KILL SOMEBODY?!? Holy Shit!!!! I think I'm about to KILL a human being!!!? Fuck!!! I have to KILL SOMEBODY!"
A short, one-sided gunfight ensued.
So true. I really have read the cruise and state fair pieces many times but can't get into the fiction. Shame.
it's a very "just deal with it till episode 3 when it really picks up" but it's page 300
Bravo! Calling it now, this will be my favorite book review. I think you really *get* The Pale King in a way that lots of reviewers didn't.
I happened upon some essays of Wallace's in 2012, and Good Old Neon hit me right between the eyes. I read Infinite Jest and the essay collections right away, and saved The Pale King for last.
I think about both IJ and TPK all the time - more than any other fiction book, TV show, or movie. I think I like TPK a little bit better? I wish it had been finished, but I think I like the experience of reading it more than IJ. (Wallace makes the reader feel boredom in TPK, but subjects the reader to disgust and extreme discomfort in IJ)
The subfootnotes are messed up on Substack, they all show up as part of footnote 18. Should probably be a part of the footnote they're linked from instead.
Substack just treats footnotes as hyperlinks within the article, and doesn't seem to really allow footnotes within footnotes. I discovered this the other day when a Substack I read but don't pay for had some footnotes on a paywalled article, and Substack wouldn't show me the footnotes, because they were below the paywall (even though the link to them was above the paywall).
They're not pure hyperlinks, since you can hover over them on desktop to see the footnote without clicking. But they are hyperlinks when you click on them. That wouldn't prevent them from being nested, you can put a hyperlink anywhere you want in HTML. Seems like it's just a limitation of the Substack editor.
Unfortunately, when the footnotes were below the paywall, the hover didn't show them! I had thought the hover feature was broken or changed until I saw the paywall.
> but a friend convinced me it would be funny anyway
Your friend was right. I would have been disappointed if you hadn't put nested footnotes in the review of a book famous for them. It'd have been like writing a review of a constrained writing work without following the same constraint.
For anyone who thinks life is more unaffordable now than for previous generations, I recommend reading Jeremy Horpedahl. Here is one example:
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/06/26/young-americans-continue-to-build-wealth-across-the-distribution/
How do you reconcile this with the phenomenon of these generations not buying houses and starting families?
Due to the change in building/planning style.
In the past—before the 60s—cities defined lots and sold them. People, often small time speculators bought the lots, bought plans, hired builders to build whatever they thought would return on their investment, and whatever struck their fancy. The result was interesting cities with randomly styled houses at rather random prices. Today, we have mega builder Corps, who buy thousands of acres of farmland—that shouldn't be developed. These Corps hire planners with a goal to maximize the ROI—cause that's called diligence to the shareholders. Do you want your retirement fund losing money? —No, you want the corporation to return the greatest ROI on the building project.
So the corporation lays out the community, plot size, minimizing underground utility expense, minimizing street expense, optimizing lot size, optimizing home size, optimizing construction simplicity, optimizing materials usage, etc. ... which has the goal of optimizing ROI for the investors ... and this is why all new construction is between 2,200 & 3,200 square feet and costs about half a mil. Its also why you don't see 1,100 sq/ft on small lots going for $200k. The corp could build three 1,100 foot homes for $600k, or two 3,000 sq/ft homes for $1M. What's the best ROI? If the corp does the wrong thing, they're harming the shareholders (your retirement fund), the shareholders will sue, and they'll win. The corp will replace the CEO, the retirement fund's lawyers will score a lot of money, and the you? ... well, two outta three ain't bad.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. You point to the classic ROI/capitalism spoiling something and, in this case, resulting in rampant house prices. But, this supports my claim and is evidence against TGGPs, theirs being that millenials and co. are wealthier and better off.
An aside, their link's opening graph says mill's have higher *generational* wealth (ok so boomers are richer than their parents were)..and then seems to conflate this with regular wealth in its discussion..
I disagree with that posters description of why housing is expensive, but furthermore, the evidence is that millenials and gen-z are doing just as well or better than previous generations:
https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1564072558068056064
https://x.com/BenGlasner/status/1805589400849351118
And even other measures that had previously shown millenials to be behind, now show them to be _ahead_ of previous generations:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022
My contention is that the historical view incompletely represents the uncertainty of the present and the resulting stress. Even when things work out OK, it doesn't feel OK. Even if you can get a mortgage, you worry about your job or the economy. Even if you are healthy, you know you're one medical bill away from things blowing up. We're also just not building enough housing or enough of anything—we could be much, much better off and we're simply not doing it.
You don't think every generation had those worries? Those are universal and just part of being human.
I do agree with the last part though. The narrative about millennials and later being worse off is wrong....BUT with better policy, those generations could be doing MUCH better than they are.
In context, "generational" clearly means wealth of each generation.
Wealth is a terrible metric for this argument though, as most wealth is home equity. If like-for-like house prices have risen above inflation,* the average millennial may be richer than the boomer was but unable to afford a comparable family home because their money is locked up in a condo. The fact that if they both chose to live in an RV, the millennial could throw more of their money into consumer goods isn't very helpful.
The consumer goods really are both much cheaper and much better now though, in a way which isn't really commented on much because it's so boringly explained by "better technology" (although a more competitive market is probably an almost comparable factor).
*Which they seem to have in a somewhat meandering fashion, if my eyeballing of inflation-adjusted house prices and comparing them to square footage is right. It's hard to say, as Americans apparently do this weird thing we don't have in Europe where they build new houses.
As told in Construction Physics, the story is rather different. Building suburbs at really large scale and selling cheap homes at low prices happened after World War II, but economic conditions changed, so it’s rarely done anymore.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-levittown-didnt-revolutionize
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-california-turned-against-growth
Come to Texas, then, and see the past in action. With a fun new wrinkle, the excavated subdivision - no more having to build homes conforming to the silly terrain, no more houses with a bit of view- when everything can be flat! Also sadly, no trees, ever, in this scenario.
Also, in a lot of places, zoning would make it illegal to build on small lots anyway.
Housing in particular is more expensive, so more recent generations, with the same amount of wealth as previous generations, have less housing and more other things.
Starting families has always been expensive, but in previous generations, it was considered so natural and second nature that people did it anyway. People are less religious, not because religion has gotten more unaffordable, but just because there's a broader set of norms available from which being non-religious seems ok.
I think there's also a zero-sum spiral of increased societal expectations. Raising kids to 60s standards would be pretty cheap (people forget how much life in the 60s sucked). But anyone who tried that today would be shamed by everyone around them.
Family formation is cultural. The Amish & ultra-orthodox do it even though they aren't rich. People in the past did it even though they were poor by our standards.
I am just reading to my small kids "The Sams" a German children classic from 1973. The hero is some clerk who is living in with a nasty Ms. Cabbage, renting a room in her flat. She also shares her cooking with him. That sounded still common then. And highly exotic now. My eldest is on state support; still, she is living in a 2 rooms flat alone. Buying houses is financially unsound (less and less of the Swiss are doing it, growing richer all the time); and "starting a family" ... who needs THAT? Next you will suggest ironing petticoats - or teaching kids to tie ribbons! ;)
Thank you! I would have really liked this review, but that bit of hoary silliness soured it a lot.
I think the review is still pretty good (I voted for it to be a Finalist), but that part is really distracting for how silly and wrong it is. I complained about it in an Open Thread a while back without naming-names about which review I meant.
The Pale King, which is good when it's good and vice versa, is the only Wallace I've read, and I think this review is spot on at least thematically. Perhaps if I hadn't read the book, it would make less sense to me. (TPK did not inspire me to want to read IJ.)
IIRC, this is the only Finalist review of fiction this year which is written straightforwardly and doesn't use some silly gimmick. Considering Scott gave affirmative action to the fiction reviews this season, I found this result disappointing. There were some great reviews of novels that didn't make it IMO, particularly the ones of The Leopard and The Unconsoled.
I mean, using the Wallace style of footnotes in footnotes is a bit of a silly gimmick! But it's at least an earnest one, like the rest of Wallace's style.
Right! I had forgotten that because I didn't bother to read those footnotes because I hate that kind of stuff. It's one reason I will never read Infinite Jest.
Glad to see that I'm not the only one who balked at that.
Zvi also recently wrote about how things are much better than they used to be, economically.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/09/10/economics-roundup-3/
This... was a good review, but I don't think it was great. It's making me reflect on some of the things I do when teaching, though, so that's very useful.
The reason I don't think it's great is that it seems to commit the sin of telling me why DFW books are important, without first persuading me that they're good. This may be the reason why the teaching of literature goes wrong so often in schools. I ended up with a mild aversion to everything that school literature classes taught me, and I'm starting to think that this might be the problem. The reason teachers teach Shakespeare/Old Man and the Sea/Gatsby is because they're important; and if they're not inspired teachers, that's the message they convey to the students, forgetting that in order to be important, first you have to be good, so as to get people to read the damn book in the first place.
I'm genuinely enthused about Shakespeare, and I try to teach it the way I like it, but inevitably I end up having to do some information dumps about Why You Must Lerne Thise, and it surely puts learners off. The bolder choice would be to say, fuck that noise, we'll read this play the way we like it... The pressures of exams are real, though, so it will take quite a measure of boldness. OK. I'll work on that.
So this was a useful remind about how to think and talk about literature; and a reminder that one of these days I should go and try and read a bit of DFW. That's not a bad takeaway, so thank you.
Your comment reminded me of my experience in school, when I think back on it it often seems to me that the point of school was really to discourage learning to an extent (ever get scolded by the teacher for reading ahead?), curiosity or even an appreciation for the subject. Have you managed to find a satisfactory answer to the question of why someone should learn e.g. Shakespeare at that time in their life? The impression I got was the reason is "because we say so and it's important you obey".
The weird thing is, I have! I got into teaching through parenting, and I got into teaching Shakespeare through reading Shakespeare with my own kids, and with my boys, it was kinda great. I wasn't aiming to get them to do exams, just to read the plays (and watch various movie versions) so that they'd know what it was all about. So we fought through the language together, jeered at the terrible jokes, and talked about whatever caught our interest. And there's enough weird and wacky stuff in there that we could always find something.
I don't think I quite inspired them to pick up and read Shakespeare for fun; the sessions were definitely driven by me. But it was all quite positive. I think they felt like it was just one of those weird dad things that dads do, and you put up with it because it's fine as dad things go.
Transferring that approach to other students has been much less successful. A big part of the problem is that most of my students are Chinese, and don't really have the vocabulary to cope with these texts. In practice, I don't spend my classes telling them either why Shakespeare is important or good; I just spend the time explaining what the words mean. So there's a level of disconnect there. But even on the occasions when we can lift our heads up and look at the ideas and characters...
I never realised before I did this how teaching Shakespeare is actually often a civics/politics/psychology class. Like, you need to know what racism is and who the catholics and protestants are and what kind of thing can happen in a fight for succession and how guilt or jealousy can poison things and... what drinking does and what youthful rebellion is and how money and love can both be factors in a marriage and... Yeah, for 15 year olds (the usual age they teach Shakespeare in Britain; lots of my students here in China follow a British curriculum), this stuff is massively eye-opening. I've started giving preliminary history/geography/psychology classes before reading certain sections, and if I can improve how I deliver those bits, then I might start getting somewhere...
I'm sure you've thought of this already, but you could make analogies to the classic Chinese novels like Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the second of which I have read). From what I can tell they occupy a similar place in the culture.
But yeah, cultural distance is definitely a thing; I remember for Japanese audiences they had to put an American-history lesson before the Lincoln movies that came out a while back.
Yeah, that's a good idea. I do mention those works at the beginning of each course, as I try to situate Shakespeare more clearly for them, give them an idea of when he was writing. (Interestingly, the level of linguistic difficulty of those novels for modern Chinese readers is quite comparable to Shakespeare, too.) But I haven't done much in terms of comparing the content of those books to what's in Shakespeare...
I'm a bit wary of it because: (1) not every student has read those books, or even seen the cartoon versions; (2) often their understanding of the books is extremely shallow, so I would end up having to teach the Chinese work, then circle back and apply the insight to Shakespeare... it might end up just creating more work for me.
But there still might be something worth pulling out of there... I'll think about it, thank you!
You're welcome! I read Three Kingdoms because I wanted to see if I could still read something hard, and Scott's review of a world where the nerds won was enticing. And I did, and it was really quite impressive, and surprisingly entertaining for a novel written for people in a different culture 500 years ago.
What got me was how *non*-alien the thing was. Most of the people seemed to have recognizable motivations--lust for power, loyalty to friends and family, lust for power, sticking it to the Man, lust for power... there's a concept of 'loyalty to your lord' we don't really have now, but Europeans had that too back in the Middle Ages. When Cao Cao wants dragons on his clothing, over here he'd want to wear purple and have a crown, but we recognize what he's after. Liu Bei is loyal to his sworn bro and makes everyone under him pay for it. And Zhuge Liang...well, he's every one of us doing the best he can while working for people not as bright as you. And among minor characters, Mi Heng is every annoying activist you've ever met, and Zhang Song delivers the burn to your pompous, lying boss you've always wanted to give.
I actually bought and downloaded Journey to the West and Water Margin (I wasn't nuts enough to think a romance novel would survive the cultural gap well enough to be interesting for me), but at the time I was thinking of trying to write again, and I figured if I read two great Chinese novels in a row that stuff would slip into my writing and I'd get attacked for cultural appropriation. But...now that I've given up, maybe it's worth checking one of them out.
Haha, yeah, that's all spot on. I definitely recommend JTTW, I came to really love it, though the repetition can get a bit wearing.
But yeah, you're right that they've all got plenty of psychological detail that could be usefully compared to Shakespeare. I'm thinking now of the empty city strategem, where...[checks]...Sima Yi sits and thinks through the possibilities of bluff, double bluff, and triple bluff. That's just a great reference for any game of chicken between two characters.
But only if the students know the incident well enough, of course!
Heh, like the line about hand waving literature professors. There is poetry which makes lit profs talk excitedly and wave their hands; conversely, there is poetry which is pleasant to read.
I don't believe either of those assertions.
If you do ever decide to give IJ a crack (and would definitely recommend it, maybe after reading an essay or five to see if the authorial voice works for you), you'll have the great advantage of a deep familiarity with Hamlet. I don't, and have wondered sometimes what allusions I might have glossed over without it.
I was a huge fan of Hamlet back in high school, maybe I'll give it a shot.
You can't read a play though, you can only watch a play. We wouldn't expect students to read the manuscript of a good movie and recognize its goodness, so it's not that surprising that Shakespeare's goodness is lost on almost everyone.
Oh, sure, so any decent course on Shakespeare has to include watching it. Not everyone has access to a live performance, but there are a lot of great movie versions.
I think the worries about teaching of literature apply equally to novels, though.
Have you thought that maybe "important" books became important precisely because they are good at something? Of course, many educational programs fail to convey what exactly it is that's good or important.
Since this was a book review and not a book chosen for a school curriculum, there is no obligation for the reviewer to think The Pale King is good. And that appears to be partly the case as they mention they wouldn't unreservedly recommend the book to others.
I think you're right though that there could have been more focus on what was good and bad about the book itself.
I knew nothing about David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, or The Pale King before reading this review. I am struck with the observation that I now know less about these topics than I did this morning.
The writing style of the review is captivating, and yet it has nothing to say. Is this part of the effect? a scathing indictment of postmodernism? or a scathing indictment of me for not getting it?
You know less now after reading the review than the nothing you knew before? How is this possible? Are you saying the reviewer included lies or their stye was so confusing that the meaning of some things has become reversed or indeterminate in your mind, leaving you with negative knowledge?
If nothing else the review clearly stated at least a few facts you wouldn't have known before: DFW committed suicide, the suicide occurred during the writing of The Pale King, etc. Perhaps you could think of a few more.
Anti-memes, perhaps.
I've studiously avoided DFW due to (an in-person) revulsion for how his fans discuss him and his work - gives me an "imagine James Joyce except he sucks" feeling. However, this review is a finalist on this blog, and I'll have AI read it to me while I do some stuff later. I'm writing this comment as a kind of preregistration - I'm biased, so if I like this review it must be really great and well done.
I read IJ a few years back and it didn't remind of Joyce at all - loved IJ, found Portrait ok, and didn't take enough away from Ulysses to finish it.
My guess would be DFW's style is a highly polarizing one, because it is, well, highly stylized. I personally find him hilarious, but YMMV. I'd suggest starting with a couple of his essays (some are free online) to see if they vibe with you.
Oh I wasn't in any way implying that Wallace was at all actually similar to Joyce, or that I'd consider reading any Wallace. Joyce is amazing. I was just preregistering any comments I might make about this book review which I found intolerable. Didn't make it very far before giving up.
>their stye was so confusing that the meaning of some things has become reversed or indeterminate in your mind, leaving you with negative knowledge?
Pretty much this. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but you nailed it.
I don’t understand this. Without looking back, I can recall that the review described DFW’s progress from postmodernism toward whatever was to come next, which had to do with reviving sincerity and humanism without fully reverting to some kind of revanchist fantasy world, and in particular there are many mentions of the idea that “doing your job” is central to that vision in a way it’s argued not to be to modern leftists and (overly online) rightists alike.
As far as the books, we were certainly told that IJ is long and complicated and its fans are unpopular on the Internet but that the author, even as a woman, adored it anyway, while TPK is unfinished and contains a very nice novella in uncharacteristically simple prose. Was all of this really that hard to grasp?
Really interesting review.
For anyone reading this who enjoyed the review/DFW writing, I'd like to recommend "The Northern Caves" by nostalgebraist. It covers similar themes, and in particular the weight of dull, lonely moral responsibility that (the reviewer says) tormented Wallace reminded me a lot of Mundum.
Right? I got Northern Caves vibes almost immediately.
Which is why I stopped reading the review pretty quickly. Reading that kind of stuff costs too many sanity points for my budget.
I've never read Wallace, but everything I've heard about his work makes it sound very different from The Northern Caves, a work told linearly (albeit from one of the characters writing after the fact), focused on a small group of characters with no digressions, and with a clear beginning, middle, and ending.
I agree that The Northern Caves is a great piece of fiction, but I'd say it has more in common with Nabokov's Pale Fire than DFW.
The northern caves loses a lot when you realize it is just a pastiche of the MS paint adventure forums with a bunch of made up words.
I guess I can see some similarities in how it's about the fan community of a long weird fiction series, but given the main focus is on (the fictional book) The Northern Caves, which doesn't really have an analogue in the works of Andrew Hussie, I don't see how this is actually that relevant. (Nor do I see how that detracts from it even without this major difference.)
(In reading The Northern Caves, I did find myself feeling a bit disappointed that I couldn't actually read the Chesscourt books because they don't exist.)
It goes beyond thematic similarities. The characters in TNC are based on forum regulars from MSPA. The crazy theorist guy was based on crazy homestuck theorist BKEW, who still posts on tumblr. If you actually used the forum
back in the day it isn’t a mysterious and strange place, it’s just mundane and annoying since all the terms were fed through a fandom dictionary that doesn’t exist.
To me, knowing that Aaron is based on some dipshit who liked running his mouth too much answers the hook you mention immediately. It’s just nonsense that sycophantic homestuck fans were desperate to make look deep. I lived through that.
I was a MSPA forums regular and I never had an issue with The Northern Caves, the inspirations are fairly loose and indistinct. It's like saying a WWI historian can't enjoy Lord of the Rings.
* a anglo Saxon mythologist can’t enjoy lord of the rings
Both are true. Tolkien was a medieval historian, as well as a veteran of WWI.
You may find ACOUP's analysis [0] interesting. Main take-away for me is that the battles were fought via morale, rather than via the sideboard. It also discusses logistics.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
"I knew that Wallace had been posthumously #MeToo’ed ... the allegations weren’t great. And actually they weren’t even allegations"
I've always found something more-than-passingly-adolescent in the New Left's eagerness to cancel and shun. It smacks of the angry, disillusioned teenager who discovers that her "don't do drugs" parents once smoked pot in college and screams "I hate you I'll never listen to you again!" The anger, of course, comes from the pain of shattering a childish idealized vision she had of her parents: "I'm angry that you're not the perfect people I want you to be." So too goes the cultural cycle of valorization and condemnation that we've become so accustomed to. Whence the need for idealized role models that's so intense that we can't tolerate any evidence that they might not actually be able to live up to our impossible expectations?
I don't think it counts as an impossible expectation to hope someone you admire didn't try to buy a gun to kill someone. That's a pretty typical expectation in my life.
Every time stuff like this comes out about a celebrity, I have to think that there's ten thousand cases of a non-celebrity doing it and I don't hear about it because they aren't famous and it never came to any kind of formal legal case. It really normalizes it in my mind. It read a story like this, and it makes me think buying a gun with the vague intention of killing someone is perfectly normal, probably lots of people have done it and I just don't know about it.
He didn't try to kill him, he thought seriously about it. Everyone is a mess and lots of people do nutty things in the context of romantic relationships. Who knows what really happened and who goaded whom into what, exactly. The stories we hear are always one-sided and the truth is always more nuanced. We have a court system for dealing with actual terrible people. Outside of that it's just he-said she-said and talking shit about a dead person is just classless. Collectively deciding that a dead person was terrible because his very-ex gf (who was cheating on her husband with him, btw, so let's not think of her an some kind of innocent angel) said he was a shitty stalker-y bf 20 years ago seems more than a little adolescent. The only thing I know for sure is that she kept her mouth shut until the precise moment that DFW was no longer around to rebut her claims or provide context. Frankly that's all I need to know. Only a terrible person does that.
I meant "in order to kill someone".
Yes people do nutty things all the time. Usually they don't involve seriously contrmplating murder.
A lot of people prefer not to get into public arguments with famous people. Doesn't usually help your career, and gets their crazy fans on your ass. I don't blame anyone for not airing that sort of thing till they're dead.
I believe it was Chris Rock who said "if you haven't seriously contemplated the murder of your spouse then you haven't been in love." I've seriously contemplated murder many times in my life. Never done it, but I think we do ourselves no favors in pretending that murder is an unnatural impulse. Obviously you shouldn't do it, but there's nothing wrong with you for thinking about it. Condemning it is not unlike the Puritanical 50's scolds who told boys they'd grow hair on their hands if they masturbated, or were going to hell if they fantasized about sex. If someone commits a crime then fine, but until then get the hell out of my head. Nobody likes the thought police.
>I don't blame anyone for not airing that sort of thing till they're dead.
I do. It's tasteless and opportunistic. She's a worthless cunt IMO.
If someone does awful things to you, you are allowed to tell other people about it after they're dead. I don't see how that could possibly make you a cunt.
Sure, she can tell her friends. But keep private things private. For all I know she wanted her husband dead and manipulated DFW into almost doing it. Relationships are complicated, people are weird, and women can be untrustworthy manipulative shrews. They do the dirtiest shit and then pretend like they were the victim (cf Amber Heard). I don't believe a single word of her story.
The thing that makes her a cunt is that she tried to make a name for herself by opportunistically tarnishing the name of a high-achieving person who wasn't around to defend himself, and she did so by revealing deeply personal details of a long-dead relationship. It's very cowardly to wait until someone is dead to do that, and the form of her attack should cast serious doubts on her reliability. It's trashy, low-class behavior and that leads me to suspect that she's also a self-serving liar. DFW was psychiatrically unstable; more so back when he was newly-sober and involved with Karr. She was older and more experienced. If we're going by the standard MeToo playlist doesn't that automatically make him the victim? Yes she's a cunt. Fuck her and fuck anybody who takes her story seriously.
>Who knows what really happened and who goaded whom into what, exactly. The stories we hear are always one-sided and the truth is always more nuanced. We have a court system for dealing with actual terrible people. Outside of that it's just he-said she-said and talking shit about a dead person is just classless.
Very much agreed.
>until the precise moment that DFW was no longer around to rebut her claims or provide context. Frankly that's all I need to know. Only a terrible person does that.
Nit: Sometimes people procrastinate, albeit starting to air grievances at the _precise_ moment DFW could no longer tell his side of the story is indeed very suspect.
Another good reason for waiting until they're dead is if you're afraid they'll hurt or kill you if you talk
Many Thanks! Of course, the "hurt" might happen to actually be telling his side of the story...
Somebody whose life’s work is creating art dedicated to reconstructing a notion of human decency that could be central to the life of people again in a post-postmodernist world turns out to throw tables at his partner and take concrete actions toward committing murder and hang himself in a place where his wife will find him, and that doesn’t make you at all more concerned about whether he’s figured out a real vision for the good life? Granted these questions are richly complicated in general but the author of the review treated them unusually carefully; it seems like you’re responding to something totally different. This isn’t Al Franken pretending to grab a woman’s butt.
I have no interest in whether he was a good person. I only care if I find value in his work. Most of the best things in history were made by people who can be made to look terrible with the right framing. It's a pointless exercise. We're all flawed. We're not all talented. The retrospective shaming nonsense is just a way for sad, angry, talentless losers to tear down people who have actually contributed to the world. Fuck them. They're just bitter that they don't have anything to contribute.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case there's a huge amount of "the author" in his books that's just impossible to ignore. So much of IJ is like: "Hi, author here, this is a work of postmodern fiction so I, the author, am directly talking to you, the reader." And then you read about how he was directly inspired to write the book by his crazy obsession with his ex, and then deliberately commited suicide in a way that would shock his current wife. It's just hard, knowing that stuff, to read his stuff without thinking about what an asshole he was. It's like trying to admire the brushwork in a Hitler painting or something.
Hard disagree. The people with the biggest demons are the ones who have the deepest understanding of the human condition. It's no contradiction that someone who makes great art is also capable of terrible things, and IMO the belief that it is is a reflection of a fairly shallow understanding of life.
The reason the Hitler comparison is inappropriate is Hitler was a lousy painter. We only know of his painting because of the other stuff, so "admiring his brushwork" conceals a dark selection bias in the type of artwork you're choosing to analyze. Had the Holocaust been perpetrated by, say, a 70-year-old Picasso then there wouldn't in fact be any problem with appreciating his earlier artwork, but with Hitler we only know about his art because of his atrocities - the art has no merit in and of itself. With DFW it's the other way around: the only reason we know about his darkness is because his art was beautiful enough to warrant investigation of the author. Also you're just tripping Goodwin's Law.
I don't think hypocrisy is the worst crime, but it leaves me uncertain about whether the standards advocated are achievable.
I specifically suspect that Mary Karr, the noted fabulist, coy at best about how much of her ‘memoirs’ are fiction, who has never corroborated any of the amazingly well-told stories which have made her famous, who went public about these allegations just in time for her to claim a few extra pages in DFW’s posthumous biography… may have dramatized the events and left out some context.
I wouldn't be surprised if, forty years down the line, a new generation with different preoccupations goes back through all these accusations and finds a lot of them were pretty flimsy. Everybody always wants to prove the last generation was bad.
Yeah, it's kind of like David Brooks writing the morality book and then running off with a younger woman. Or 'Virtues' Bill Bennett getting caught losing all his money to online gambling. (I'm old.) The real-life action directly contravenes the message of the book.
My husband is a fan of his "History of Philosophy" so I once ordered a copy of "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell. I think that was the title. It was one of those take-your-luck used book things and I was amused to discover that the entire book - every sentence - had been underlined with occasional circling whose pattern was mysterious. Anyway, I don't think it's a bad book or anything, I didn't really get too far with it. But later on I reflected that it was kind of crazy that I thought I could better some more original source, with a self-help book from Bertrand Russell of all people. And obviously Bill Bennett, pleasant as he no doubt is, is no Bertrand Russell.
It seems to me that literary people always talk smack about each other so this doesn't move me the way it does you, but I did stumble over the "weren't even allegations" part.
I understand these things are supposedly or evidently corroborated by letters he wrote Karr but they don't seem to have been made public.
The idea that she would have a drama-free relationship or would even have been interested in that, seems improbable to me.
As Texas writer Don Graham once put it in a piece about Mary Karr (on the fairness or validity of which piece I make no comment, having not read her) but which certainly applies to many another in the genre: The Augustinian (sin) or Rousseau-ian (no-sin) confession is "the true father of the confessional memoir, a term that is actually something of a misnomer. The typical protagonist-narrator of such books does not confess his or her failings or sins (a word that rarely appears in these intensely secular books) but instead reveals dark family secrets, sensational “dysfunctionalities,” and, best of all, criminal sexual acts committed against the memoirist."
That's a fairly Christian way of thinking about it, and therefore long since past passe in modern literary circles.
But I think you're right.
It has to do with the generational changing of the literary guard from men to women, I think. High-status men used to do these kinds of things to women and get away with it (in literature and in politics), and now that the women are in charge, they're going to return the favor and dig up all the bad things men did to women (things women did to men will of course be swept under the rug). All of DFW's pals used to look the other way; now that the gals are in charge they're going to listen to all the women he hurt along the way.
I also do think there's sort of a tendency for women to be the enforcers of morality, which is why you see that new moralistic attitude in the left. Young, rebellious guys used to storm the barricades for communism, now they're becoming tradcaths (but only in terms of regulating sexual morality for women) and posting physique.
These things aren't absolute, of course--nobody is a perfect representative of their gender, race, etc., and many people swim against the tide-- but *in aggregate* they have an effect, especially with things like literature that are prone to groupthink, fashions, and cliques. Most human endeavors are, of course, but the one advantage the physical sciences had, despite being subject to social and governmental pressure like anyone else, was the existence of an objective reality you can use to prove or disprove positions. But is David Foster Wallace better than Elif Batuman? Who's asking? Who are you asking?
Sadly I think this is correct. There's a new sheriff in town and she's insane.
The human condition is hard. How many of us can say we emulate our moral vector?
We are faced with so many dualities. We must strive. Strive for what's good and right, encourage this in others, yet simultaneously be gentle and understanding of our limited condition.
Life seems to bear many paradoxes. To me, I see someone who espoused tenets of humility, and, well, the many other things you describe much better than I could, but who nonetheless found themself—or at least perceived themself—to be living outside that (e.g. his desire for independence from Nardil, self-flagellation around careerism, etc.).
These can be difficult or impossible to reconcile, and a swift, expansive mind like his would find no shortage of ways to find and suffer them.
This review made me buy IJ
>This speech is set in the 80s, but was written in the 00s, when the internet was nascent and social media hadn’t yet taken off. Wallace’s diagnosis is prescient: between Quiet Quitting and Live to Work, young people are rejecting the tedium of office life and embracing the life of the influencer, which does indeed involve both the trappings of rebellion and conspicuous consumption.
Come on. Office Space and Fight Club were released in 1999 and instant cult classics; conspicuous consumption featured as something to oppose rather than to strive for, but rebelling against The Man in his shiny offices was central to their plots. Calling FDW "prescient" here is taking it a bit far.
They Live was 1988.
"Non-conformism is just another kind of conformism" has been a stock joke since the 1950s at least, I remember it from old Mad magazines.
He's a paradigm beyond them (criticizing the reflexive "anti-establishment" attitude of Fight Club / Office Space)
Fight Club is definitely already making the point that the edgy rebels against conformism end up just as conformist as the establishment they're rebelling against.
Fight Club bashed the system and the rebellion both, not much positive vision
> Cynicism in societal institutions is endemic on both the right and the left, perhaps with good reason: while a bureaucrat in the 80s could expect to own a home and support a family, these days an ‘ordinary’ job doesn’t cut it.
Doesn't look like it to me?
Peoria County house price index increased ~125% 1989-2022: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS17143A
Peoria County median household income increased ~125% 1989-2022: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHIIL17143A052NCEN
Peoria proper, in 2022, had a median household income of $58k and a median home value of $147k: https://datausa.io/profile/geo/peoria-il?redirect=true. Not great, but well within the range of what's affordable.
US federal employee pay is a little harder to find data on but the base pay for an mid-level (GS-10) bureaucrat appears to be ~$26k in 1989 vs $58k in 2022, again in line with a 125% increase and roughly comparable to the median Peoria income.
My best guess is that the beef, and the difference, between Boomers and Millennials has a lot less to do with affordability as such and a lot more to do with how okay Boomers vs Millennials are with being a bureaucrat in Peoria. Anyone care to change my mind?
> a lot more to do with how okay Boomers vs Millennials are with being a bureaucrat in Peoria. Anyone care to change my mind?
That doesn't really disagree with the theme of the review though. It's all about our difficulty to converge on what our expectations in life should be at this point, when the old ones don't work. So "how happy we should be at the idea of being a bureaucrat in Peoria" is up for reevaluation, like everything else.
Don't cry for the poor IRS agent. These people are lawyers and CPAs. The IRS has to compete with the private sector for talent, just like any other employer, and lawyers and CPAs do fine in the private sector. They do fine working for the government too, per this google search I did:
According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for an IRS Internal Revenue Agent is $89,000 per year, with an average additional pay of $4,000 per year. The total pay range is estimated to be between $75,000 and $116,000 per year.
I don't think they have to pass the CPA test either. I've heard the IRS called a "work program for those who get accounting degrees and can't pass the CPA" and I think there might be something to that.
It's probably one of those things where it isn't mandatory, but it'll definitely help you climb the ladder if you do.
Well, as far as I can figure out, there are no Federal bureaucrat jobs in Peoria anyway. https://greaterpeoriaedc.org/major-employers/ ... there's a Caterpillar factory and a big hospital and that's about it. Government bureaucrats tend to live in Washington DC or other big cities.
I agree with the idea that life isn't expensive if you're willing to live somewhere unfashionable, and that house price problems are concentrated entirely in fashionable areas. But it's not just a fashion thing, it's a problem that the economy of all first world countries has become increasingly concentrated in a small number of big cities, of which Peoria is not one.
The difference is that the people who live in big cities set the cultural tone, and in big cities housing indeed has become unaffordable for many people.
>Like this. I should add, I hope the affectation of footnotes for this essay isn’t cloying or obvious. I worried that it would be, but a friend convinced me it would be funny anyway, and besides, the piece was already glutted with many parentheticals so I figured, why not.
It is both cloying and obvious. The structure of the review very much mirrors the subject matter:
- Review author believes DFW is speaking to the reader from personal experience, and speaks much of her own personal history and relation to DFW's work.
- As mentioned, footnotes within footnotes.
- Abrupt end of the unfinished review like the book.
I find the review author to be emotionally much too closely attached to the subject to give a critical opinion of it. Also this makes it the second book review finalist this year where the review is in the distinctive style of the subject matter. I find this an off-putting gimmick in both cases, and I hope there won't be yet another like them.
Agreed
I hope there would be more like them. Let people like things. Let people have fun.
Concur with this. I felt some emotions while reading this review, I learnt about the author, I learnt about the book, I learnt about the context it was written in, and overall I enjoyed this a lot and wouldn't mind more reviews in this personal style. (To be fair, I wouldn't mind more reviews in other styles, either, I'm enjoying the variety.)
How did I abridge your right to enjoy things? And if I did, I would ask you to let me dislike things. Let me be dour.
Sure thing!
It accomplishes one of the functions of a book review, in showing you what the book's style is like so you know whether you'll enjoy it. It's more illustrative than the typical "this book is rambling and self-aware" sort of description.
I didn't think of it like this but you make a good point.
I really don't want that though. When I read that first poetry review, I learned nothing about the book or about poetry because I gave up halfway through the review, so how was that a good review for me?
It wasn't quite as bad in this review so I read through all of it, but I will still question the objectivity of the reviewer and therefore the usefulness of the review.
When I read a book about a foreign language I don't speak, I don't want that book to be in that language. When I read a book about encryption, I don't want the book to be encrypted. When I read a review of a book and author I don't know, I don't want the review to indulge in too much of that author's style if it gets to the point where it distracts me from the review itself.
"I find the review author to be emotionally much too closely attached to the subject to give a critical opinion of it. "
I agree this is bad if you're thinking of eg a systematic review of studies about gender transition, but why is it bad for a review of a work of fiction, which is inherently supposed to be emotional and about how it affects you?
As a metaphor: Let's say I was suffering from a genital rash. I see a doc, they prescribe something. The pharmacist offers me a choice of several creams with that active ingredient and, in addition to his professional opinion, recommends me one variant that helped him personally with the same condition. I'd be glad to hear it, and I wouldn't even ask for a single peer-reviewed study!
But then the pharmacist literally unzips his pants and shows me his junk to really convince me that the cream helped him. He goes on a lengthy rant about how it revived his sex life and how that gave him the confidence to finally divorce his estranged wife and propose to his heretofore secret boyfriend. I'd most likely be more than a little weirded out and seek a different pharmacist altogether even though him telling me all those juicy details objectively changes nothing about his professional qualification or medical experience with that wonderous cream.
Like you said, this isn't a peer review for an academic journal; I'm all for the reviewer importing their personal POV, whether or not the subject is fiction. This review was fanfic-adjacent though, which I'm not ready to fully accept as a style of review. I mean, Footnote 2? "Please let it be noted, I eat much healthier now.", with the sub-footnote "I lean sweet over savory"? Okay.
And then the abrupt ending of the review. The review is primarily of The Pale King, not Infinite Jest, so am I to take the ending as a suicide joke, or what? The jokes and personal anecdotes just feel off. Too much of a good thing. Less of that, please. Not nothing, but less.
That strikes me as quite a bad analogy, for what it's worth.
I’ve never tried to read Infinite Jest because I heard that it was a Post Modern novel and I didn’t like the other post modern novels I started to read. Calling it a post-post modern novel makes me more interested in reading it. I wondered why I thought it was a post modern novel, so I googled best post modern novels, and sure enough, Infinite Jest was in the top 3 of every list. I assume this is a situation where the work that criticized its predecessors ended up being better than the rest, but it is interesting see that disconnect.
Postmodernism also has the disadvantage of having a name which implies it could contain anything after modernism and of being more or less the last product of a culture of Western literary criticism sufficiently focused to produce and name new movements; in both linguistic and semantic senses, it’s easy to argue that nothing comes after postmodernism.
Isn't it rather an advantage, for those who are mostly positive about pomo? And yes, it is easy to argue that nothing comes after it, because nothing has seriously challenged it as of yet.
DFW was a Reagan and Perot voter. He was anti-Bush, but this is very much a Didion trajectory. So it's hard today not to view him as at least somewhat of a "conservative" thinker. He also has a long essay where he defends prescriptivist approaches to language which puts him alongside people like William Safire.
Has any writer of Literature ever been a descriptivist? I'd bet against it.
The PoMo novelists and the Oulipo school writers are good candidates here. I can't confirm at this moment though.
I would have thought there's a good number of writers of literature who delight in language in all its variety, and are keen observers of the use of language by different groups, and want to participate in it.
Plenty of great writers use slang, if that's what you mean, but slang is very prescriptivist among its enthusiasts. Slang mutates quickly but given the time and place there's a correct and an incorrect usage of slang words and phrases.
A good writer will choose specificity over generality as much as possible and steer far from potential ambiguities (unless multiple meanings are the intent). To take an example, the word "bemused" is often misused these days. A descriptivist might say that bemused has merely taken on a new meaning over recent decades. The problem with the descriptivist view for a writer is that now the word has no precise meaning at all. It will be interpreted differently by different readers. That's rarely what a writer wants at the word for word literal-meaning level.
Didion once said given the opportunity she would have voted for Barry Goldwater as president every single time.
Really good. Enjoyed the links as well.
Reading this review I was, "left with something beautiful but"
What is interesting about the book? It seems like a mess, but maybe books are, including other bits I've read by DFW.
I enjoyed this book and this review very much, both left me feeling sad and a sense of loss, well done
Haven't read *The Pale King,* but since a number of readers are using the comments to comment on the presumed unpleasantness of reading *Infinite Jest*, I thought it worth it to mention my experience. I inhaled *Infinite Jest.* I didn't read it because it's "important," I read it (twice) because I really, really enjoy it. Like, couldn't put it down, stayed up too late reading it. I think it's fun and funny, filled with hilarious sections like the part in which the protagonist's father subjects him to a drunken rant comparing the existential significance of a tennis ball's corporeal reality to Marlon Brando's slouchy acting style. I do have criticisms of it—DFW needed a more ruthless editor; the parts in which a trans federal agent and a wheelchair-bound assassin ramble about the nature of the world while watching the shadow of a mountain slooooowly process across a landscape are reeeeally baggy—but these criticisms are dwarfed by the sheer *fun* of it all. Highly recommended.
To counter some of the negative reviews, I think this was well written. I liked the footnotes and the mimicry of some of DFW's style. I may even finally go read Infinite Jest which has been sitting on my bookshelf for 10ish years. I'm not sure if this is my favorite review, but overall I enjoyed it.
Very interesting. The subject is hugely topical - the upheaval, restructuring and growing pains of modern culture, with post-modernism as one of its major phases.
Forgive me for giving it a rather materialistic interpretation to begin with. Socio-economic-cultural conditions had been pretty stable for centuries, life was very hard by today's standards, but culture had had plenty of time to converge on something that worked. Social stratification, wars and plagues, community life, religion, hard work, labor division within the family unit, the works. Then the industrial revolution happens, which brings economic conditions way up. Science happens, literacy increases, philosophy perks up, and suddenly all the traditional narratives and orders are in shambles, either because they no longer fit the conditions, or because we've stopped being able to believe them.
So what we get is a barrage of literal attempts of culture to find its bearings again. Great waves back and forth, positivism here, romanticism there, marxism over there, free market liberalism... eventually post-modernism and the minimalist aesthetic. It's hard to overstate how many references faltered. We've all heard the hot CW topics downstream of wealth and technology and individualism, like the sexual revolution throwing out a good chunk of our moral system, but you have weirder causal chains like economic growth paradoxically bringing cost disease, which makes housing expensive, so our great-parents' trinkets and furniture are no longer family wealth, but clutter. It's like pieces falling everywhere, the narrative myths of religion (chief of them: the myth of God as the adult in charge), the sense of community; much work becomes abstract and paper or screen-based, abstracted away from any gut feeling of producing something of value, and so on and so forth.
So I totally get it when DFW basically wants to say "yes, we can't just go back to the past, and yes, all our old certainties and values are in shambles and they're not coming back, but can we please get past the cynical phase? It's been a while, Nietszche and Sartre came and went, we've had time to mourn all the old certainties. But we're still humans, we're still here, we still have to get up in the morning and see our faces in the mirror and greet each other and get stuff done together, so can we please find some non-cynical way to continue the business of being humans and doing our human stuff here?"
What I find most striking about all this is the sheer intensity of feeling on all sides. It strikes me as just about excessive. The old cultural order was so sure of itself, so absolute, with God sitting at the top of a chain of validation all the way down to the pecking order within your family; I guess for a long time people really wanted to find some new absolute to replace that. And they tried, which is why all these *isms sound so damn prophetic, from the Romantics to the Marxists to the end-of-history-ists. And I agree with the reviewer that DFW in the end fell into the trap of excessive intensity; it doesn't get more romantic and intense than killing yourself. And the reviewer openly concurs, explaining the despair of their own fall from intense far-leftist ideology. The mind just refuses to let go of the search for some *final idea* that would put an absolute order to everything.
Except that there isn't one. And it's fine! Look, you're alive. Yes, you can care about things, you can be earnest within your domain, it's the sane thing to do. But you can also breathe, have some fun, smile, cry, forget, whatever. Maybe that's what DFW and the leftists and the rightists and the warriors and the hedonists all forgot - to have some balance, to do what needs to be done, and then still find yourself alive and dance for a bit.
Haven't read anything by DFW but the brief interviews of hideous man, but that and this review made me realize how much he was influent, at least stylistically, in these parts of the internet. The footnotes, the post-meta-ironic detachment. At least this blog and dynomight strikes me as particularly influenced by him. Am I reading too much into it?
I've never been able to tell the difference between influences and the changing of the times.
I think his whole Against Irony thing has been very influential among many current writers, artists and bands. Much of this recent Freddie deBoer post, for instance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-dont-have-to-be-a-try-guy reads to me like a reboot of DFW's 1993 essay: E Pluribus Unum: Television and U.S. Fiction https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
I'm not knocking Freddie, who's a great writer in his own right, but I'm pretty sure that old DFW essay has influenced his thinking.
I don't think I was especially influenced by DFW, especially not in eg my occasional use of footnotes. Works have used footnotes forever; DFW's innovation was using so many of them, in what was obviously a work of fiction, that it became kind of a gag.
I'm not sure it was even his innovation; sticking to funny modern writers nerds like, gag footnotes in a work of fiction formed an iconic part of Terry Pratchett's style. (Though he didn't use quite so many of them.)
I think Jorge Louis Borges may have been the first major writer to use footnotes in his works of fiction. Does anyone know of an earlier example?
It's been many years since I've seen a copy, but I vaguely recall there were some footnotes and other oddities in Tristram Shandy, a comic novel by Laurence Sterne written around the mid-1700s :
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190521-is-this-the-best-shaggy-dog-story-ever-written
I just flipped through my copy of Tristram Shandy and yes, it does have some short footnotes in it. Good catch!
Which is sometimes described as 'postmodern before postmodernism', so it fits.
Approximately the same era, Flann O'Brien used extensive footnotes in his novel 'The Third Policeman' - an excellent book but maybe not so well known outside of Ireland. It was written in the late 1930s, but not published until later due to the Second World War.
The protagonist studied philosophy, and the footnotes detail the thinking of the fictitious de Selby, and the rival biographers and commentators. One chapter progresses the main story by one paragraph but features a six page footnote.
Brilliant book. And footnotes with a life of their own that will probably never be beaten, imho. Simple, nothing like DFW.
If you can find it, Flann O'Brien's essay A Bash In A Tunnel slashes DFW-like writing, armed only with an odd unrelated anecdote.
You can really hear it in Matt Levine’s writing voice.
I’ve been using ‘wastoid’ regularly ever since I first saw it in the Chris Fogel section (which is available as a standalone novella called like “The awakening of my interest in advanced tax” for anyone interested in a small slice of pale king). It is a wonderful word. But I don’t append drug habits to it generally. Plenty of wastoids who just play video games and order door dash on their parents’ credit card.
This is a great essay, but a man who died from switching medications might not be the best laboratory for understanding how culture and philosophy can kill.
“The End of the Tour” with Jason Segal as DFW and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky the Rolling Stone writer that spent a few days interviewing and traveling with Wallace is a sweet take on Wallace’s persona and his neuroses.
It’s based on Lipsky’s memoir of his 5 day road trip with DFW, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”
I’ve enjoyed watching it a couple times. I think most Wallace fan would enjoy it too.
It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Tour
I'm not much of a Wallace fan but really enjoyed that movie. I don't think one needs to enjoy DFW's writing to enjoy the fascinating dialogue in that film.
Cracked me up that he was eager to visit Mall of America. The place is just a few miles from my home but I’ve only been there once voluntarily. I’ve never understood the appeal of that soul sucking bit of American excess.
The late scene of Wallace dancing with a random young woman was kind of touching. Battling his personal demons in an earnest and practical way. Taking a bit of joy wherever he could find it.
this was cool. I've also been reading a lot of old DFW recently. I think the common characterisation of him nowadays leaves out how straight up funny he was.
I found it pretty hard to get through this review. I knew nothing about The Pale King going in. After reading the the first paragraph, I still didn't know if it's a work of fiction or nonfiction.
The third paragraphs mention someone named "David Foster Wallace". Is that a character in the book? Oh, seems like they're the author of "Infinite Jest", which if I recall, is a "exists-in-real-life" book -- probably fiction? So is The Pale King a non-fiction biography about Wallace, or is Wallace the author of The Pale King?
It's not until the twenty first paragraph that "The Pale King" is even mentioned again, at which point, we find out that Wallace is indeed the author of that book as well. But even then, the next few paragraphs are mostly... biographical stuff about Wallace, and we don't find out what the plot of The Pale King is until the thirtieth paragraph.
30 paragraphs is a lot to ask for before getting the "payoff" that I was expecting entering into this review. I think I would have appreciated something like what was done in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel where within the first three paragraphs, I'm told why I should care reading through any of this.
It was definitely problematic that the first two paragraphs didn't say who The Pale King was by (I was trying to remember if it was Nabokov, but that's Pale Fire). I recalled when the third paragraph mentioned David Foster Wallace, giving us the antecedent for the "him" in the previous sentence, but it definitely should have been clearer.
I think the curse of knowledge makes the antecedent relationship seem more clear than it actually is. I think a more natural inference for someone not familiar with any of the proper nouns involved is:
1) The first paragraph uses the noun "the author".
2) The second paragraph uses the pronoun "him", probably referring to "the author".
3) The third paragraph uses the proper noun "David Foster Wallace", but there is no reason yet to assume that "David Foster Wallace" and "the author" refer to the same person.
Yes. When I went back and looked I saw that the third paragraph had not in fact made this clear to anyone who didn’t have the relevant fact somewhere in the back of their head.
Next time try https://en.m.wikipedia.org
My earlier comment wasn't a request for help. I have several tools for learning more about a topic, Wikipedia indeed being one of them.
My earlier comment was intended as feedback to the author of the review, which they can incorporate along with all the feedback given by others in this thread, and decide if and how they want to change their review-writing process.
A review that you can’t actually read without checking Wikipedia throughout isn’t a great review.
Many publications always put the title, author, and bibliographic information about the book at the top of all reviews (I always thought it was a bit weird to list the publisher, number of Roman numeraled and regular pages, and the price of the currently available edition, but I can see that it’s often better to include all this than not).
I've never read Infinite Jest but have absorbed that is a influential book of today's canon. There is always a frustration when referencing literature, I feel this way when people assume I've ready book X or essay Y.
I like this piece a lot, but not as a book review, I think. There's just too little of the book in there. I appreciated the author's exposition of her own feeling regarding DFW, but I think there's too little of what she actually got from The Pale King in there and a lot more about her personal relation to Wallace's literature.
As some people have said, I think the author is too biased about the book to write a good review - but still, I think she's written a good piece.
Agreed; I want a book review, not a biography of an author. Honestly quite surprised to see that it's polarising rather than simply negative; dreading this winning.
Honest question, would you rather read something that everyone rates a solid B or something 50/50 A+ and F-?
In complete honesty, "solid B". Especially if the context is "read something from an unknown source with no strong prior reason to believe it'll appeal to you."
Over the last couple of months, I've been intentionally trying to expose myself to viewpoints that I disagree with, so I've been reading a lot of (subjective to me) F-'s, and it's been reeaaaaallly painful.
It depends on the rating scale and the reason for the A+. New, relevant information is important enough to risk it, but if it's just a matter of enjoyment (and static text, unlike e.g. a videogame where I can get hours and hours out of an A+) give me the B.
So was The Pale King good?
I thought the review was good exactly because it avoided clear judgement and instead simply turned the thing around to examine it from various angles.
Yeah, agreed. I was just trying to be ironic.
Fair enough. Now I'm glad I didn't go off on a whole-arse rant about AND WHAT PRAY TELL DO WE GAIN FROM LEARNING WHETHER OR NOT A TEXT SATISFIES SOME ANONYMOUS REVIEWER'S TEDIOUSLY BELABOURED AESTHETIC CRITERIA, and all the rest of it.
The answer to that is hidden in footnote 12. I've not read anything by Foster Wallace, but I suspect this was an intentional homage to him judging by all the back and forth about footnotes...? If so, and if it makes sense in the context of his writing, it was well done.
This was great. It’s been a long time since I read him, but maybe I should go back there again.
“You can’t cut away the messy human bits to preserve your clean, linguistic sanctum.” Oh but I can. (Descriptive, not normative, mind you.)
I read Infinite Jest when it was in the "new books" section in my high school library. I lost a lot of respect for David Foster Wallace when I read his book about infinity, and he got so many of the things wrong. But I still appreciate what he was doing in his fiction.
It probably helps that my intellectual background these days is in analytic philosophy, and his writing is definitely influenced (though not in a straightforward and literal way) by his (brief) graduate work in analytic philosophy.
I enjoyed this review. I actually put Something to Do With Paying Attention on my to-read list.
I've only read a few essays from Consider the Lobster. I loved the writing, but the attitude struck me as too post modern and threw me away. "Yet another ivory tower type poking fun at pop culture", was what I initially thought. Too bad, because I never got to the parts where he tries to use post modernism to fight post modernism, which I think is a worthy goal:
> Wallace is, of course, on team human. His criticism of the profit motive parallels his rejection of minimalism, the aesthetic of postmodernism: when we reduce reality to a thin, abstract variable, whether that be profit or discourse, we mutilate it.
I never made the connection between the two, but now it's so obvious. Bauhaus. Chrome-coated balloon dogs[0]. Painted girders[1]. All of it feels neutral, meaningless, like depression given physical form.
[0]: https://jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon-dog-0
[1]: https://sohobroadway.org/a-look-back-at-sohos-broadway-forrest-myers-the-wall/
Ah, I'd been really worried this year's Book Review Contest was a complete atrophy into at-best-middling-in-prior-years entries, but this is an admirable return to form. Reviews the (real book!) content thoroughly, gives a sense of context and milieu, connects to other closely related ideas that enhance understanding and entice further curiosity, has toothsomely satisfying length and depth. It's hard to escape DFW even without actually ever reading him, he's just been that much of a modern literary titan...many know *of* Infinite Jest without having read it. Having only read Consider The Lobster myself, I don't have a particular craving for David's more goliath works, but Total Party Kill certainly sounds like an interesting book. Perhaps I'll pick it up after hacking through Joyce's Ulysses. Do think the overarching morals would have served me well in idiot-youth days...you really can get quite far in the modern world by Just Showing Up, reliably punching in and out, sticking with the tedious instead of chasing ephemeral glory, bringing the receipts. But, importantly, this path relies on a critical mass of other people *not* following said staid advice, of having enough faffing-about to rise above without heroic efforts. Doing what would have been banally unremarkable in the past isn't exceptional unless the present is exceptionally unimpressive. (And actual heroic efforts are rewarded, not consummately exactly, but People Do Notice anyway. It's continually amazing to my Lawful alignment how many rules people are willing to bend to keep a black swan worker happy.)
Did find the scattered leftist apologia offputting (it's hard to truly leave the radical left, I guess), although it's a bit hard to disambiguate between views of the reviewer vs views of DFW. I'll also continue to bet long on Barthes: an author contains their collected works, but the collected works don't (fully) contain the author, and very frequently evolve new facets in their own right as readers interact. Any doujin fan feels this instinctively in their bones! Anyway, here's at least one we can very confidently say wasn't authored by Scott, unless everything I know about her is deeply incorrect...
Who on earth would want to read Joyce's Ullysses these days? I gather it comprises a studiously banal account of some non-entity wandering around a city chatting with other equally boring acquaintances. It is also littered with weird word plays, which to me betoken little less than a disordered mind, and jokes maybe once topical but long since receded into total obscurity.
Give me a proper novel any day, such as Moonfleet, or Lorna Doone, or an excellent one I bought in a thrift shop and read only last week, Viking Fire, by Justin Hill, about the life of Harald Hardrada.
Ah, it's a long-running masochistic bet with an old friend of mine. They struggled heroically to read Ulysses for years and failed, and have now bequeathed the accursed book to me. Normally you're right, I wouldn't bother with such intentional obtusity...had more than enough of that for a lifetime raking through House of Leaves. If I actually wanted to pick up an...ambitious...book for intentional reading, it'd be Sadly, Porn, which I am sad didn't make finalist status for the contest this year.
This was my favourite of the 20+ reviews I read, and I'm very happy it made it to the finals!
To the author: some friends and I started a book club to tackle IJ together, and had so much fun with it we never stopped (and recently started publishing the audio of our meetings as a podcast). We'd be thrilled if you joined us to discuss the Pale King, or perhaps a favourite short story? Hit me up if you're interested—we can preserve anonymity until after the contest ends (or forever if you prefer).
As a DFW fan it has been an interesting exercise to figure out where I think he goes wrong, both on the page and off of it. We get into some criticism of his writing in this Brief Interviews discussion: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WXxwTuoxgKaXxGMvK3UBe
and some criticism of him as a role model/guru figure in the finale: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bbW7njVxj1vJK7jJnCNLD
>"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention."
This is the sort of quote that persuades me that I wouldn't enjoy reading DFW, who I've never tried. This seems like the kind of perspective that probably seems insightful if you're cynical and depressed, like DFW was, but seems boring if you're not.
Where's all the fiction for un-depressed people?
They call it "genre fiction", although pomo has infested that pretty thoroughly by now as well. Joe Abercrombie is still fun though.
In these coments I keep speed-reading "pomo" as "por no". This is slightly confusing, as the reviewer never mentioned that Wallace's epic novels contained any saucy pictures! :-)
I would say that the extract essentially expresses how Buddhism defines Dukkha, one of its central concepts. This idea, almost as old as civilization itself, is considered important enough to be at the heart of one of the most widely followed belief systems.
I don’t consider myself a ‘depressed person’, but the fact that some people find this particular version of Dukkha alien and unrelatable never ceases to surprise me. I guess, like everything else in life, our default neurochemistry exists within a spectrum, and some people really won the genetic lottery of being happy by default, without having to work or think much for it. I suppose I’m envious. Even if not depressed, I do have to combat the Dukkha—or however you want to call it—on a daily basis, and avoiding ending up resorting to, let’s say, unvirtuous ways, is sometimes a true challenge.
I consider myself pretty un-depressed, so I read fantasy and science fiction almost exclusively. Most of it fits me, because it either focuses on mechanical/scientific problems (like Andy Weir's books, or Neal Stephenson's), or on solving people's problems in positive ways (Becky Chambers' and Nathan Lowell's books).
Somewhat related rant:
This I discovered in school: I absolutely hate Russian classic literature, because nothing ever gets solved in it. It's all about exemplifying a problem and then leaving the reader without any positive examples or possible paths to a solution. "Everything sucks and then you die" is not an uncharitable description. You're supposed to learn something from those books in school, or so adults say to children, but I always wondered what I was to learn. It's like providing a neural network with only negative examples. It can't possibly work. So I fell in love with classic American sci-fi, because characters in it Solved Problems. With blaster or brains, it doesn't matter. Of course, Golden Age sci-fi is a bit short on people's problems, and is more concerned with broken spaceship engines or invading aliens, so its lessons aren't directly applicable in real life, but at least it teaches you that solutions ARE possible for almost every situation, and you should seek them instead of sitting on your ass and feeling sorry for yourself. Not the worst lesson, I think! And well, newer sci-fi deals with people, too. Of course, fiction books don't always present you with clear instructions on fixing problems: often, the long and painful period of actually searching for solution is skipped, and the hero just gets a brilliant idea in the nick of time, which is very unrealistic, and can maybe make one feel a bit dumb, because he can never ever approach cleverness of book heroes (while stupidity of classic literature heroes is very relatable for many). Still, it's better than nothing in my opinion.
Gods, even just halfway through this, and my reaction is that we’re so lucky to get to read writing this thoughtful. The way the author slips in pieces of her background — like Easter eggs in the dishwasher — is a delight.
The idea that great wickedness and great virtue coexisting within the same heart constitutes a "contradiction" is an artifact of lazy thinking - modeling people as simplified objects with unitary moral valence. When the mind is considered as a collection of subsystems, it seems obvious that stronger-than-average antisocial urges, plus desire to avoid negative consequences thereof, plus basic self-awareness and ability to plan more than one step ahead, leads naturally to deliberate cultivation and analysis of virtue, with a cognitive budget generous enough (due to the stakes) that the project soon takes on a life of its own and produces insights which can generalize to be usefully shared with others.
Relevant traditional saying is "there's no saint with half the zeal of a reformed sinner."
Indeed. Only *some* of those hard-earned insights actually generalize, and excessive zeal plus "typical mind fallacy" isn't particularly compatible with checking which do or don't.
Is there actually evidence that Wallace did reform though? Your argument that someone with a particularly high level of temptation to do bad things might put a lot of thought into how to do good instead makes sense, but if someone does bad things, that's also evidence that their ideas on how to do good don't work well. If doing good follows from a combination of natural inclination and good ideas, I'd expect that the quality of someone's thoughts on morality and the morality of their actions to be positively correlated overall.
Somebody who builds a dam across a deep canyon probably ends up knowing more about making stone structures sturdy and waterproof than somebody who builds an equivalent-sized pyramid in the desert, but a masterfully sealed dam may still be more prone to catastrophic failure than a mediocre pyramid, since the pyramid doesn't have that original river to worry about.
I don't think the metaphor really adds anything that wasn't already explained more plainly, but going with the metaphor anyway, we can't actually see how big the canyon is (see his intrinsic character). We're just sitting downstream, reading Wallace's thoughts on concrete recipes and stuff, and occasionally experiencing floods when whatever it is he's building fails. In that scenario I'd still be disinclined to take his advice, for the same reason.
There are plenty of other rivers that don't flood, and sure some of them might just be easy to build on, but without knowing which those are, I'd think the non-flooding rivers are still a better place to look for competent engineers.
Actually, following the metaphor that far isn't even right, because loads of places aren't large rivers, but everyone has at least some harmful desires.
Hmm, this isn't really that important to the review. But I played Ultimate competitively for several years in college, and casually for several more years afterward, and no one ever mentioned David Foster Wallace.
Is that really a thing?
It probably was at the colleges Deirdre Coyle (the originator of the frisbee quote) and her friends went to, which makes it a reference all of them would recognize. One of the things about the loss of mass culture is there are lots of obscure signifiers nobody recognizes in any piece of writing coming from a different social group. (I still scratch my head about some of the references on here from time to time.)
I did go through the list of books all white men have and am thinking about using it as a reading guide. (I've read a few, of course.)
Loved this one. I feel that what Wallace tries to discuss is indeed so hard to put into words, that we should all value more what he was trying to do there.
I would also like to recommend to anyone interested in the themes discussed in the review his essay, ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,’ in which he explores how Dostoevsky’s works continue to be relevant. They address universal human concerns—particularly the conflicts between belief and non-belief, the individual versus society, and the problem of evil—in a way which I’m unable to do justice to in this comment.
Isn't the problem of evil only an issue for people who believe in a benevolent omnipotent god, and therefore not a universal human concern? Or do you mean something different by "problem of evil"?
Choosing “The Pale King” is cheating!
…because it automatically gets my vote 😅
It sounds like Wallace was another example of the perils of having a pair of super-intelligent parents. Like Virginia Woolf, his mental inheritance besides literary talent seemed to be hyper-sensitivity and hyper-awareness along with fits of depression, so much so that both ended up topping themselves.
Disliking mannered and contrived prose, I've always tried to avoid post-modern fiction, and one thing I learned from the review is that this prose style is deliberate. But why is it considered commendable for an author to let verbal and stylistic artifice get in the way of their story? I'd be the first to agree though that I'm a hopeless literary Philistine!
people like the prose style a lot, it’s fun and gives a lot of space for interesting writing. highbrow-lowbrow contrast starts to seem dated these days but the basic structure still works for people. also people really enjoy interacting with complex footnotes (see “House of Leaves”, a commercially successful book that’s still selling to this day)
It's funny, because I sometimes find it annoying when story gets in the way of style. Like when instead of racking up yet another hypersensitive observation or metaphor that I couldn't have come up with in a hundred years, some brilliant writer has to devote entire paragraphs to schlepping a character over here, and another over there, and contriving some tiresome event that has to follow logically, I guess, from whatever preceded it. Sure, they still manage to make the structural stuff look good, but then you realise those bits are no longer all about the voice and feel sad.
I don't think the reverse of this is philistinism, though. And I wonder if the two positions wouldn't find common ground in something like Flaubert's realism.
Loved this review. Definitely voting for this one.
Join the battle against digital involution!
Read Tom Swift:
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/
I’ll just throw out one more bit of Infinite Jest (possibly apocryphal) trivia here. I don’t recall where I read this but the story goes that Wallace and Jonathon Franzen were hanging out and ‘in their cups’ discussing the ending of IJ. Wallace always insisted that the abrupt finish was intentional and the savvy reader would understand the intended meaning
According to the anecdote, a somewhat inebriated Wallace told Franzen that he just didn’t know how to end the novel
I wasn’t one of the savvy readers who knew the precise intended meaning but I also didn’t leave the book dissatisfied. I found it more enjoyable on the years later second reading.
How would liking ultimate frisbee and the Mountain Goats be a bad thing? It seems like this is a surefire way for women to identify a CATCH.
Am I the one who's always been struck by *coffee table* incident? When he got mad and violently threw something at her, it wasn't the remote or a cup or something, he didn't *pick up an end table* and throw that at her, he threw *the coffee table* at her. What is he, Superman? Why not throw the couch at her? Maybe the fridge?
Coffee tables come in many different sizes.
Quite dramatic, right?
Incidentally, if you have ever read Mary Karr, it’s quite remarkable how nothing boring ever happens to her. It’s always poignant and striking.
Vaguely reminds me of the story of the Duke lacrosse kids where the presumed victim was supposedly thrown through a glass table that should have killed them. Nobody bothered to question it because they didn't want to be seen as interfering with women's being believed when things happen to them.
Thank you for this review. I started it with a bit of a flinch-- I'm not very interested in DFW and some of the book reviews have been chores-- then I found myself actually wanting to read it.
As for a return to sincerity, have an approximately Chesterton quote: Seeing through everything is indistinguishable from being totally blind.
I remember the Samuel Johnson formulation from time to time and I can say it doesn’t get less true with age, at least so far: “Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her”.
Reminds me of the prime series, Patriot.
Maybe the fact that this review ends in "but" was intentional?
I've read a lot of DFW commentary, read a few of his short works, and tried to read some of the longer stuff (including the Pale King). So while what I'm going to say may sound like a jerk, I mean it to be constructive. And it does all tie together thought it seems to start off on a tangent.
So what I have to say is that, IMHO, DFW shows the limitations of art and a certain type of lifestyle.
Ultimately DFW is unhappy, and his art reflects that unhappiness, because he insists that life should be lived as an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic life is the 20th/21st C version of the religious life. It's the life that judges everything and everyone by whether they meet my particular *aesthetic* criteria. The essence of the aesthetic stance is not exactly artistic so much as judgmental, to have a (mostly negative) opinion about everything, and an opinion based essentially on vibes and appearances, not on details like history, or what the people affected think, or whether what's seen actually "works" in some sense.
Why is this so destructive?
In the first place it allows for no empathy. An empathic person can understand that, even though I'm not much interested in working on a farm (or as a doctor, or in an IRS office, or...) I have plenty of evidence to indicate that many other people are so interested. But it's very hard to imagine that other people have different *aesthetic* preferences than me: if I see something as ugly, I can't really believe that someone else sees it as beautiful – or simply doesn't even care.
In the second place, the aesthetic life if the imposition of the choices of the rich on the poor. NIMBYism is an obvious version of this, but honestly every aspect of life in the US in 2024 is about enforcing aesthetic choices that (what a surprise) meet the desires of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. You can see this starkly when you visit an alternative society; China is a good choice, but I suspect the same would be visible in India. What you see in these countries is material infrastructure – power lines, tunnels, bridges, housing, etc – that, sure, isn't beautiful, certainly that wouldn't be buildable in the US; but it is *functional* and it's a lot better than what was (or wasn't) present earlier. In rich China this is no longer obvious, but go to poor China, eg Tibet or Sichuan province outside Chongqing, and you'll see the contrast side by side – the stuff that was available till a few years ago and the new stuff. The choice to prioritize aesthetics is the choice to prioritize how *I* (a person rich enough that aesthetics are my dominant priority) feel over how actually poor people feel...
In the third place, the aesthetic life is the life of judgement, unending judgement. And since most people (even people who also prioritize aesthetics) have different tastes from you, it's also the life of unending unhappiness. The sensible person looks at the supposed consumer lifestyle and says "great, more goodies for me, all very cheap"; the aesthete says "these people are living life WRONG!!! And somehow that's enough of my concern that I need to be constantly miserable about it".
I think I've said enough that you can now situate DFW in the argument I am making, whether you have read all his works or just this review. DFW, for example, does not look at the IRS office and think "There are people who choose a life of accountancy and find it fascinating; let me see if I can understand their excitement"; no his stance is "I would hate to be an accountant, therefore everyone how is an accountant must be miserable, therefore I will be miserable on their behalf". You see something similar wrt to farming. One of the most interest elements to Paul Theroux's travelogue _ Deep South_ is how many old black people told him they had enjoyed working as agricultural laborers back in their youth and they wished those sorts of jobs still existed as part of their worlds. A similar version of this is how the US has settled on a narrative that certain (very few) jobs are 'good" jobs, and everything else is by implication garbage (as are its practitioners).
The aesthetic stance is no way to live a life. It's a recipe for making yourself miserable, along with everyone else around you. And yet it is the dominant "intellectual" stance in the West, it's how we are taught to live in school and then college. It provides no meaning, no satisfaction, no joy; it's the penultimate step before nihilism.
Alternative of course exist. The religious life is one. The life of service (genuine service, where the goal is to help people, not gather statistics to be used to criticize the world) is another. The STEM life, in various forms, is a third.
DFW was smart enough to see the vapidity of most of the Postmodern stance. What he was not smart enough was to see that all he was rejecting was "level one" of the Postmodern stance, while he should have been rejecting also the deeper substrate, the Aesthetic stance. You can't "This is water" your way out of a defective and deficient world view if literally every person around you holds that same defective and deficient world view. If DFW had been more of an interviewer, more interested in learning how other people think, rather than telling them how they should think, more John MacPhee going out and talking to scientists or farm laborers or athletes, things could have turned out very differently.
Obviously what I'm describing is a generic Western pathology, responsible for most of our current misery. But there's no point in me expanding on that, you can easily do so yourself...
I guess I'd rate myself as an ex-aesthete in this way, though I might have along to a kind of happy nihilism. That's an ok place. I don't need the world to make meaning for me, but I wish well to all who sail in her, and I'll contribute to that. It's interesting that you mentioned the STEM life because I expect I'd be more bewildered and clutching without it. The religious bemoan their population's loss of God and descent into animal spirits, I feel something similar about the risk of living in worlds of ideas, ungrounded by science, given over to whatever stories come along.
>But it's very hard to imagine that other people have different _aesthetic_ preferences than me
Hmm... I have aesthetic preferences, but I view them as deeply arbitrary. I would no more expect someone else to share my aesthetic preferences than I would expect them to share my flavor preferences.
Yeah I agree, but I think it's possible that many people do not think like that. I certainly know some people who are unable to make that distinction (between subjective aesthetic preferences and objective reality). I don't know what kind of proportions exist in the population.
Good point! Yeah, it would be interesting to know the proportions. Many Thanks!
How often do you see listicles like "The ten best cities to live in". Do you think production or consumption of these lists is healthy? You think it doesn't affect people (all negatively) that 100 years ago Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Toledo and St Louis were all considered fine places to live and now they're considered places to be ashamed to be from?
How about the discussion around "McMansions"? Is that healthy? Is that engaged in with a spirit of "well, opinions may differ" or something substantially more controlling and domineering?
Similarly the discussion around traffic, or around architecture, or around "good" jobs.
All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
Like I said: "This is water". You don't even realize how pervasive this mindset is, and how it is NOT UNIVERSAL, it's a particular pathology of the West right now.
Pretty much the only people who see it as pathology are those who grew up elsewhere or have deep relationships with people who grew up elsewhere, people whose response to a list in the NYT of "Ten Best Restaurants in Manhattan" is "that's an insane thing to appear in a NEWSPAPER" not "ooh, let's see which ones I've been to"...
>people whose response to a list in the NYT of "Ten Best Restaurants in Manhattan" is "that's an insane thing to appear in a NEWSPAPER"
I agree that it is an insane thing to appear in a newspaper. Many Thanks!
Some of the other ones, not quite so much. There are some objective measures for cities, for instance: crime rate, median salary, median home price, ... and the direction of preference for these is pretty widely agreed on, though the relative _weights_ will be subjective. There are, of course, other factors, e.g. warm vs cool weather, where the _direction_ of preference will differ from person to person.
>All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
That sounds menacingly similar to political correctness... Is this mostly a Woke thing?
Obsessing over what I am describing as "Woke" is, once again, to miss the point.
I'm describing a general pathology in human social behavior. Responding by saying "that's what THAT tribe does, not my tribe" (or the equivalent "that sounds like a criticism of my tribe, therefore it can't be right") is a deliberate choice to be more stupid.
I think it was Paul Graham who said something like "every word you add to your identity reduces your IQ by ten points". Part of what we are seeing in these comments is that quotation playing out in real life.
You can tell a populace about Tim Urban
https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Our-Problem-Self-Help-Societies-ebook/dp/B0BTJCTR58?ref_=ast_author_mpb
or Hans Rosling
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better-ebook/dp/B0756J1LLV
but you can't make it think.
Re Hans Rosling - I haven't read his book, but I really enjoyed some of his presentations. He can really make data shine!
>I think it was Paul Graham who said something like "every word you add to your identity reduces your IQ by ten points".
It is reasonable advice, Many Thanks! ( More precisely, words one adds to one's identity that one has an emotional investment in. I "am", so to speak, a AAA member, with an investment equal to my membership fee - in expectation that if my car fails on the road, they will send someone to tow me. Strictly quid-pro-quo. )
Re:
>All these discussions (and so many more) start from the point of view that there is one correct opinion, and something wrong with someone who doesn't support it.
and re
>a _general_ pathology in human social behavior.
[emphasis added]
There are at least two fairly different ways that "one correct opinion" can happen:
- There can be competitions to be stylishly "up to date" - keeping track of the fashionable clothing, music, colors, names, perfumes etc. E.g. the rise and fall of bell bottoms.
- There can be pressure to be politically in synch with the current ideology/language. E.g. the way the polite term for blacks gets changed about every decade or so.
- I think that there are probably other, equally distinct, versions as well. _Possibly_ fads in technologies. _Possibly_ fads in medical treatments.
Of the first two, both are ridiculously constrictive, but I think that these occur in different groups, with different enforcement mechanisms. For the latter, I do think some of the best examples are associated with the Woke, though there are certainly other groups that have done and do analogous things.
Re Hans Rosling
The reason I mentioned him is not the sort of thing you are probably thinking of. Yes, he's good at presenting data that people should know, but don't. But if there's one single message in his last book, _Factfulness_, it's that you have a big problem when the people reporting an issue are the same people who benefit from funding that issue.
It doesn't matter if the issue is US school results, or vaccination rates in Africa, or homelessness or drug abuse, or whatever. Human nature is simply such that people are EXTREMELY reluctant to ever admit that an issue that they made a big deal about is now solved, or at least much less of a problem. Whether it's that they would lose a job, or they rationalize that they're still helping people, or they internally redefine the problem, the issue never goes away, never improves. And so you simply cannot trust these people.
The issue is not that they are "publicizing a good cause" it is "trust but verify". And the entire book is basically one long depressing sequence of cases where verification was, in fact very very different from the claims of the do-gooders.
This is a general point. Just as, whenever you see a political story that seems mighty convenient for the side that are publicizing and your first thought should be "but is it actually true, as described and claimed", so whenever you hear about some social issue your first question should be "who is making these claims of such misery, and what are their incentives; in other words why should I trust them?"
And are you sure that the religious life, whose replacement you allege, allows for the kind of pluralistic empathy you see as missing from the aesthetic life? If there ever were an archetype of judgement and exclusion...
Only a dunce thinks their taste is absolute. If anything, the known arbitrariness of aesthetic judgement is what lets it coexist with alternatives, in the way that religious creeds and moral systems don't. If your friend gets excited about the wrong writer, you roll your eyes and think he's an idiot. If he gets excited about the wrong god, you avert your eyes and think he's a heretic.
That's not to say you're wrong about some people trying to create artificial aristocracies of taste, or about the money-taint of the whole thing, but strong counter-cultures form and thrive. And the artistic life, done right, is a life of service no less self-effacing than any missionary vocation. Whatever you want to say about DFW, he wasn't doing it for clout or money. He was writing, in the way he was, because he clearly couldn't help himself.
Perhaps the biggest difference I see in classical art and modern art is that quite a bit of classical art moves me towards something. I like the pieces that move me towards something better, like kindness or curiosity.
Modern art lacks that. It's pure aesthetic. It seems in conversation with itself and divorced from any knowable reality.
Much if the discourse I see online is purely aesthetic too. Probably the one that rustled my jimmies the most is about how we live in a dystopian future. Someone posts a photo of a robotic dog and others simply comment how this is yet more proof we live in a dystopian cyberpunk world of all powerful corporations where everyone else is a wage slave. There is no connection to reality, to nuance, no counter examples. It's purely aesthetic.
I concur that there's a cancer eating away people's ability to interface with reality. I'm not sure how much of it is tied with DFW--the review makes it sound like he was aware of this problem and was trying to find a way past it.
“I think I've said enough that you can now situate DFW in the argument I am making, whether you have read all his works or just this review. DFW, for example, does not look at the IRS office and think "There are people who choose a life of accountancy and find it fascinating; let me see if I can understand their excitement"; no his stance is "I would hate to be an accountant, therefore everyone how is an accountant must be miserable, therefore I will be miserable on their behalf".”
This doesn’t strike me as being true of DFW. I don’t think you have a handle on him yet.
Come on! It's true of the Pale King, it's true of A Supposedly Fun Thing, it's true of Brief Interviews.
Maybe I am a stupid reader, but what I take away from all of them is contempt mixed with misunderstanding, ie judgement unleavened by a serious attempt to understand.
Compare with, say, Chuck Klosterman. You can imagine Chuck Klosterman tackling the same material – but with a very different (and IMHO far healthier) tone.
"judgement unleavened by a serious attempt to understand"
This is nearly the exact opposite of Wallace's attitude and the problem his telos seeks to undo. I think every person I have spoken to who likes Wallace gets his deep drive to understand and empathize with others, to pay close attention to the currents of life going unseen, even when it is difficult, repugnant, boring, inconvenient. It's weird to me that you have read him and concluded that he is actually striving for the exact opposite of his stated goals, and that you think he's an aesthete—like, *Wilde* is an aesthete: Wallace is, again, the opposite.
He certainly failed in being able to navigate the world, and there are certainly problems with his worldview (for one, it is far too idealistic about what one can achieve through pure emotional labor), but I think you have targeted PoMo correctly and incorrectly identified Wallace as some sort of champion of its worldview rather than somebody doing a decent good job of struggling out of its confines.
He didn't make it all the way to actual Christianity, but the idea that Wallace is not a religious writer lacks insight—and the dude, apparently, very quietly attended church regularly. So again—you're trying to get a round peg into the square hole of your argument. You don't have a handle on him.
I think this is one of these things where, if you approach an artist from one direction you stress X, whereas if you approach from a different direction you stress ~X.
Look at "This is Water". DFW sorta understands that he thinks this way, and that it is destructive: The middle section that ends with "If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience ..."
He does what you claim he's doing with the next paragraph about "’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him...", you score that as "he's showing empathy".
But none of that is my point. My point is go back a few paragraphs, to
"Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
"
Look at that. That's exactly what I'm talking about. He kinda knows that he is being 15 ways of judgmental here, he kinda knows that he is egging on a crowd that will engage in exactly the same sort of judgmentalism – and yet he can't stop himself. He's willing to kinda sorta concede well maybe an individual act by some person was done for some reason, but no more than that. Consumerism is TERRIBLE (citation not required) Hummers are TERRIBLE (citation not required)
Look at the flow from the red meat to the "you need to think". It's NOT "you need to think why are you so AUTOMATICALLY against cars and suburbia and products and the rest of it", the furthest he goes is "you need to think that even though the guy driving the hummer is OBVIOUSLY an a-hole, maybe on this ONE occasion he actually had a good reason to cut you off".
He's willing, as I see it, to concede that some people's ACTs can be understood by empathy, but he's not willing to concede that some people JUST ARE HAPPY TO LIVE DIFFERENT LIVES DRIVEN BY DIFFERENT MOTIVATIONS.
Look at a sentence like "you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. " I mean, yes, I'm glad you're willing to concede the lack of sleep part, but WTF do we need the fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up part?
You see him as trying to steer these kids away from the worst snap judgements of their schooling. And yes, that's certainly better than nothing.
But I see this, as I phrased it, simply as "level 1". He's still trapped in seeing people different from himself, making choices different from his choices, and reflexively thinking "NO. WRONG! Goddamnit, live life the way I want you to."
That's what *I* am trying to stress, as what I am calling the "aesthetic" life.
I think you're right.
Ironically the social-justice thing is sort of a combo of the religious and service life, seeking to improve the world in service of the cause/religion.
No, you're missing the most important points.
Yes, there has always been an element of the religious life that's primarily about judging others, but the religious life as understood by people sympathetic to it, and the life of service, are NOT primarily about judging others.
If you believe that SJW is actually about improving the world, not about the analysis I gave above, well, I'm sorry, but we are on opposite teams. You're like the guy who sidles up to me after I defend some conservative economic position and says "yeah, you're right; now about those queers". Sorry about that!
But hey, read what I said, think about it, look at what SJW's actually DO (not what they say, what they do, and don't do, and how often they change their ideas in response to evidence). Maybe in a few years you'll see my point.
I partially agree with you.
Both the religious life, and the SJW 'religious' life, draw from a mix of selfish motivations (judging others, getting to persecute others) and unselfish motivations (serving God, helping others). Most movements have a mix of motivations or they wouldn't be as successful as they are. Priests were among the few Spaniards fighting against the conquistadors' persecutions of the Indians; they staffed hospitals and educated children. Cardinals built palaces for themselves from the faithful's gold. It's rare any movement is all-good or all-bad.
I do think a lot of SJWs genuinely want to improve the world. That they wind up doing the opposite in practice is just another inconvenient thing solved by convincing themselves that what they're doing is actually good...just as Christians in the past convinced themselves that they were saving the souls of the Indians or slaves or whoever. How often do religious people change their ideas in response to evidence?
Of course, plenty of SJWs desist and change their minds.
The only difference (in my opinion anyway) is 'by their fruits shall ye know them'; religion worked pretty well for thousands of years, Marxism and modern social justice, not so much.
Second time this cycle that a comment has outshine the review itself.
I've always thought of DFW as a guilty pleasure: a worldview I reject, but so much fun watching him express it.
I think this comment could be (and deserves to be) expanded into a very interesting essay of its own, even without relating it to DFW.
I always feel weird when DFW is mentioned. First, I knew his father—he was one of my professors in graduate school. A favorable review of “Broom of the System” was displayed proudly on his office door. Second, DFW took his own life the same weekend my son took his.
That’s a cruel reminder. There are some wounds that never fully heal and I’m sure that your loss is one of them. I know the words of a random internet stranger don’t amount to much but, for whatever they are worth, you have my sympathies.
I appreciate that.
I wonder about MAOIs and their potential for resurgance. You note that they can be very effective, but fell out of favor because of their diet related issues. The dietary issues stem, in part, from our insistence on long lasting MAOIs which irreversibly poison MAO. But there are shorter acting MAOIs which reversibly interfere with MAO. Perhaps they could be used more, and then people could have their cheese in the evenings.
Insert the correct word:“The really important kind of (BIG WORD) involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” - a) Love b) Life c) Dedication d) ...
Putting "freedom" instead, is a) plain wrong b) manipulation c) profound d) ... .
It started like a great review - for a moment I even thought: Is it Scott? (now I guess it's an ol' friend of his). But then came pseudo-intellectual overloaded word-clusters as in "resurgence of doctrinaire political ideology" (isn't 'doctrinaire political ideology' tautological pleonasm, hence redundant?*).
Scott may do a sentence as "The Pale King is in many ways arguing ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day". But not a monstrous: "The Pale King is in many ways revanchist, arguing for reclamation of territory lost to hedonism in the name of old-fashioned ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day "
*yep. Any "intellectual", even me, can do three tricky words instead of one. The good ones avoid it. cuz a) pretentious and b) smoke-grenading the reader.
It's not the greatest word cluster in the world, but it makes the point--people are really getting into social justice, Marxism, Trumpism, and neofascism, and DFW didn't predict that.
I am old. I see no change in how much "people" are getting into "social justice", never as popular a topic as the NYT believes it to be. There were some Marxists before 1989, after: it is mostly fake (and a few fall into that hole as ever). Trumpism is not an even an ideology - and surely not a "doctrine". As being fangirl of JFK or Brandt was no ideology. "Neofascism" in its widest sense has merely become more visible - similar to foot-fetishism. - Sure, media loves to paint 1968 as a peak of political interest - my parents then could not have cared much less about Woodstock/Nam/ ... but had political convictions all the same.
I'll agree with that. I would say political involvement goes through cycles, and DFW was writing at a low point and didn't predict it to go up again.
I learned so much while reading this review.
A retreat from postmodern ideals would undoubtedly improve some of the unsavory superficial aspects of modern society, but it's halmark minimalism is something I actually lean toward. I wear minimalist clothing, I write minimalist code, and generally err on the side of minimalism with most things within my control.
I've actually said repeatedly that minimalism is always best.
Now I hear that this is a frodulant statement! I probably won't change, but my code might get a little more abstract.
Postmodernism is not about minimalism. Like any large idea (especially one that's been put to many political purposes) it means many different things, some of them contradictory, some of them rather insightful, most of them destructive and/or stupid.
One very uninteresting strand starts with the claim that every human relationship whatsoever is about nothing but power, and goes downhill from there.
Another strand was somewhat referenced in the review, the claim that people (and especially "us moderns") live so much in language that it is language, not reality, that defines our worlds. The somewhat reasonable mild version of this likewise soon veers off into insanity, with claims like "quarks are invented" and similar, the sort of nonsense that got Alan Sokal so riled up.
The one element that is actually (IMHO) both actually true and actually interesting (saying something valuable and non-obvious) is discussed in unending detail by David Chapman at https://meaningness.com/#contents
You probably don't want to read the whole thing! But in small doses it's very interesting. His point briefly summarized is that MODERNITY is defined not just by rationality but by a very specific implementation of "rationality". Modernity, as in post-Newtonian physics, then a century or so later chemistry, then eventually biology, is about
- starting with a set of "obviously true" axioms about you field of interest then
- deducing logically consequences from those axioms.
This gets us an awful lot, including, for example, analysis and calculus up to about 1850, or physics up to about 1890. BUT it's not the end of the story. Because, like it or not, the actual axioms required to understand the world (whether the math of Cantor, or QM and relativity) are in fact not "obviously true". Something more is needed, a level of creativity and daring beyond what was imagined by people who put together the classical Modernist paradigm during "The Enlightenment".
Chapman's shpiel is one (very very) extended riff on this point - ways of thinking before Enlightenment/Modernity, ways we should think after Enlightenment/Modernity, how Postmodernism began with something useful to say on these issues but soon got derailed by people who were unwilling (or too stupid) to understand that you cannot useful critique Rationality until you've actually executed it in your head for at least a few years, how all these stances affect culture, etc etc.
This is not an orthodox "definition/analysis" of postmodernism. But it is an actually useful one!
Not strictly relevant, but: boy, do I truly, truly, with all my heart & soul, blackly & bitterly: fuckin' *hate* Chapman's writings on Buddhism.
I don't think anyone could so completely miss the point, toss the baby out with prejudice & keep every drop of the bathwater, go down the up escalator (and also it's a Chinese escalator), and generally somehow manage to pick the worst possible set of interpretations, practices, & conclusions it's possible to pick*...
...if they'd /set out/ to see "how horribly can I pervert the useful parts of Buddhism so as to create a sort of similarly-worthless(-but-even-uglier) Western mirror image of the intellectually-bankrupt Pure Land varieties? maybe make it philosophically & spiritually bankrupt too? now there's an idea!--"... and then //proceeded to do just exactly that.//
Gah.
...y'know, I've never really articulated it, heretofore. Maybe I should write an essay about it.
.
.
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*(well, in my personal opinion, obviously. may be slightly exaggerated. it's been a while; I just remember being appalled, with near-mortal blows dealt first to my pedant's soul, & then to my philosophical heart; and if I've any tiny, malformed nub that was meant to be my third eye of spirituality, he poked a finger right in its sensitive ectoplasmic jelly, too.)
Sure why not?
Certainly right now I have no idea what your complaints are and if they are basically “David made fun of MY Buddhism — which is basically Unitarianism Lite, ala Lisa Simpson and Richard Gere”, some bizarre issue of technical doctrine of no interest to anyone outside Buddhism [cf Christology disputes], or something more substantial…
It's... probably closer to #2, heh: not of great relevance unless one is a practitioner or has an academic interest in the topic, and (as far as I know) my view is very much in the minority, outside of some 14th-century Sakyapa & Gelukpa monks.
Now, 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 fellows had their heads on straight.
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[I.e.: if I DO write an essay on it, probably the only engagement I will receive is angry comments from fans of the "Crazy Wisdom" guy ("Chsomething Trungpa"?)--because the thing I'll be attacking is very much the more popular sort of interpretation online (and that variety in particular is--surprisingly, to me--quite numerous)...
...unless... 𝘶𝘯𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 I'll have tapped into a hidden wellspring of fellow-feeling among other reactionary Buddhist pedanto-elitists, making my fame and fortune?
Yes... yes! I've got a lucky feelin'!--]
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I probably do need to make it an entire Thing to articulate it in any kind of convincing way--and I certainly need to refresh my memory of what Chapman actually wrote; I may be attacking a ghost (widely considered to be a bad idea)--so please forgive me if I just sort of gesture unconvincingly at some concepts, like a bad improv actor.
(I will make a solemn vow, here & now, however: if people give me money, I will return to make it actually persuasive & erudite. 𝘔𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘵.)
Anyway, I'll write the following as if you're not a Buddhist; pardon if you are & it's all just review for you!
So. Essentially: a long, long time ago, in a land far, far away...
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...there was a brilliant & handsome North Indian mahapandita & mahasiddha, an individual well-versed in the Dharma, to whom it fell to defend the Truth from the depredations of a Chinese heretic.
You see, Buddhism was flowering in Tibet, but along with the pure nectar of Sanskrit teachings came a foul effluence from the East: Heshang Moheyan's seductive words, telling the Sangha it was time to lay down the burden of 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵 & 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 & 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦... why, just stop thinking, and boom! You're already Enlightened! Don't even bother to keep the Precepts, ha-ha!
...okay, maybe that wasn't 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 what he taught. The crux of it, anyway, was a battle between the Indian presentation of the Way--gradual attainment, with deep contemplation & vinaya rules & study of an enormous body of texts--with a burgeoning Chinese presentation of "direct" or "sudden" attainment of Unbinding.
Kamasila, it is told, journeyed to Samye, or maybe Lhasa, and there defeated Heshang or a representative thereof in debate--and so Vajrayana became firmly Gradualist in orientation.
So, in the "gradual" vs. "sudden" enlightenment debate, the former has been by far the majority view, outside of China & Japan. Southeast Asian (Theravadin) Buddhism, Indian (Sarvastivadin / Sautrantikan / Mahayanist) Buddhism (when it still existed), and--as said--Tibetan Vajrayanist Buddhism all subscribe to it.
...officially. (𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥, 𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺)
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In a horrible episode--good movie fare, IMO: "Tʜᴇ Sᴜʙɪᴛɪᴛᴇ Rᴇᴛᴜʀɴs!"--it seems that the wily (Wylie)* Tibetans actually sort of... gradually (heh heh) snuck the "sudden way" back in, 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵.
It's one of those things where a particular formulation has become verboten, so proponents have an Officially Totally Different way of putting things... that amounts to the same thing in practice; hence, you end up with (particularly Nyingmapa & Kagyupa) luminaries such as Tsewang Norbu starting treatises off by roundly damning that Chan perversion of subitism...
...and then going on to explain that Mahamudra or Dzogchen are 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵, are distinct in 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 from the mere "cessation of concepts" (mitokpa/misampa) that the misguided Chan teachers tried to corrupt our good Tibetan lads with--but are 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘶𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 & 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 "𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘶𝘢𝘭" 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.
(This is an oversimplification, of course. These scholars were not dumb, nor ignorant--they had/have many subtle reasons & justifications behind the distinctions they made; I'm just sayin', 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 is how it has ended up that my antisubitist position is the Actual Minority even though it's the Official Majority.)
Anyway, as you might be able to tell (and also, as I just said--), I'm firmly on one side of this divide.
It has gradually (...heh heh) become clear to me that pretty much all of the earliest & most canonical of Buddhist texts--most of the Tengyur, most of the Kangyur (with a few notable exceptions, to be dispensed with when I write the Real Essay), the Pali suttas, and even the Chinese agamas--are very clearly on Kamasila's side, re: the 𝘋𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘢𝘮𝘺𝘦-𝘰𝘳-𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘺-𝘓𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘢.
It has 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 gradually become clear to me that something is rotten in the state of Kham.
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...Look, I know it's pretty arrogant to say "entire groups of people who know way more than I do & with traditions of centuries of scholarship & practice are 𝘵𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨..."
...but, nevertheless, they are. Not my fault I see so much more clearly than m--
--okay, okay, no; I'm not saying that Dzogchen & Mahamudra are worthless, or nothin'. Undoubtedly, they truly do suite some people best, and one of my absolute favorites among all Buddhist thinkers/teachers known to me--Patrul Rinpoche--was himself a big proponent of both.
Nevertheless, as proof-of-concept: consider the Burmese "dry insight" movement & its (only-just-ebbing) popularity in the last century.
Here we have a school of thought which--I believe--almost no serious scholar of Buddhism defends on any grounds other than "well, hey, you do you"; many, many different lines of evidence converge on the proposition "jhana/dhyana was either 𝐚 key component or--quite possibly--𝐓𝐇𝐄 key component of Buddhism, as practiced originally & throughout the vast majority of its history."
And yet, as with the "Unitarianism Lite" sort of Buddhism, here we have a group of people--very many of whom are plenty intelligent, educated, kind, etc.--who ended up grabbing the wrong end of the stick. It happens.
But--that particular stick... er... illness, let's say, was relatively easily diagnosed, & is being cured apace: wasn't dominant in Theravadin tradition (nor even in 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐞 Theravadin history), by any means; had no great antiquity with which to entrench itself; and really hadn't been given much textual support even by its advocates.
It's almost an "historical accident" it even caught on. (Lesi was motivated by political considerations as much as Buddhist ones, I think.)
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Likewise--but worse, by far--I find issue with the presentation of Mahamudra & (esp.) Dzogchen/atiyoga, in the modern West...
...which just 𝙝𝙖𝙙 to be the one that (IIRC) Chapman 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳, didn't it?
Ironically, for all his contempt** toward Lisa-Simpson-milquetoast-Buddhism, I feel like his sort 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 takes the strongest & most "alien-technology"-reminiscent (to steal an idea from Scott) part of Buddhism; and replaces it with a sort of humdrum so-what? piece of machinery, instead.
What do I mean by this? Well, for example, suppose the following supposition:
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⚠️✎ ⚠️
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𝑼𝒉-𝒐𝒉, 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘷𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘹𝘪𝘮𝘶𝘮 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦 KᴠᴇʟWᴏʀᴅs™ 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺! 𝘗𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘵 𝙘𝙤𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙨𝙩.𝙨𝙪𝙗𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙠.𝙘𝙤𝙢 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘈𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 & 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘣𝘰𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨!
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📜✍
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(...I'm kidding, I'm kidding!
It just occurred to me that 𝐀.) this is already way too long for something approx. 1 person--who may not even be 𝘺𝘰𝘶...--will find interesting, and 𝐁.) well, if I've written this much, I may as well take it & try to turn it into something a bit more polished...
If anyone 𝙞𝙨 interested, I'll try to finish it within half a day or so.† Cheers.)
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𝒇𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒔, 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒐𝒏
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*(𝘩𝘦𝘩 𝘩𝘦𝘩 𝘩𝘦𝘩)
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**(𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘐 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨... 𝘦𝘳, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘺...)
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†(𝘐𝘧 𝘯𝘰𝘵, 𝘐'𝘭𝘭 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘣𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘺, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦--)
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Yeah, I'm sorry, as an outsider this very much has the feel of Arianism vs Nicaea or Nestorianism vs Chalcedon, and every bit as utterly uninteresting to anyone not invested in any of those camps...
I, for one, usually find rants like these interesting. (Having understood only ~30% notwithstanding.)
incidentally, chapman is certainly on my list of "things to explore". alas, i've not gotten to that part of my todo list yet.
p.s. Is "Chinese escalator" some idiom or cultural reference? DDG's search results were unhelpful.
I've not read DFW and reading this review made me realise why (and it's for reasons similar to those applying to Pynchon and also, and it might even make sense, to Laurence Sterne). I start and initially feel "oh wow this is amazing stuff" and then, fairly quickly (usually about 20% or less in) this initial wonder turns into "nah, no, not really; why???".
The review was similar, though I read more than a third thoroughly and skimmed the rest for information.
So somehow, an enthusiastic report on the book, mimics something about the book, perhaps.
Same. I started off quite fascinated; a third of the way in, I started sort of thinking "yeah but... do I really care tho?"
And the answer, I'm afraid, is: no. But it's a well-done review, from what I've read!
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[& that's not snarky--I mean that. This sort of thing just isn't my cup of tea, I suppose.
Near the beginning, the reviewer mentioned a time period wherein she was feeling lost, not sure what to believe in; there, she categorized, wholesale, some general... what you might call "meaning attractors" or "worldview eddies" or something [Scott's used a word for it before & I can't remember what the hell it was--nothing really obscure, either; argh; like a vibe, but a group, yannowha'amean?]:
"...the Right's like this, but also like this; religion's like this--but then again, religion also does this other thing; the X-ists do like so, but the Y-ians..."
...etc., etc. A rhetorical flourish at least as much as it's meant to be an accurate reflection of that time in the reviewer's life, no doubt--but even so, the basic way of thinking behind it is just... sort of alien, t'me.
I'd have to write an essay of my own to really articulate what I mean, but it's just--as if you read about someone fretting over whether their high-school yearbook quote is still holding up today, 20 years later: you might think, like... "no, you're... you're doing it wrong! that's not what you ought think about; or at least, not /how/ to think about it all!..."
That is, searching for something to "believe in", or doing anything except an eclectic mix-'n'-match obtained by taking one Thing at a time & carefully attempting to work out the fact of the matter--if any--just seems wrong-headed, to me. You don't need to believe in "the Right"; you take the Right's claims as they come, select the right (heh), discard the wrong. Same for all other everything. No anxiety or feeling lost required!
Then again, I've always known exactly who I am & what I should "believe in", since I was just a young lad.* I stole a phrase my ex-wife used recently, in my latest (boring, personal) essay: "Kvel," she said, "you're just so... relentlessly /you/. It's like you were born to be the person you are now--and /have known it the entire time, too./"
"Sweet," I said.
"No! It's bad, because '/you/' in this case has //a lot of really bad ideas & habits!// I'm worried about you, since I left; I didn't know you'd go downhill like thblah blah blah blah" (stopped paying attention about here, because it sounded like she wasn't saying the compliment bit any more; the important part was the beginning, anyway.)
Is this even relevant to the comment I'm replying to any more? What did I start off talking about? Am I consuming too many research chemicals? These are just a few of the questions Man was, perhaps, not really meant to know.
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*(...namely: myself. Kveldredism. always seemed obviously correct, t'me--)
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...I'm only half-kidding--]
> "meaning attractors" or "worldview eddies" or something [Scott's used a word for it before & I can't remember what the hell it was--nothing really obscure, either; argh; like a vibe, but a group, yannowha'amean?]
"reflective-equilibrium"? "egregore" is also making the rounds, these days. though that one's fairly obscure.
I don’t know how effective of a review this is of The Pale King. But, it was incredibly well written, and introduced me to metamodernism, and verbalized ideas I couldn’t, and channeled Wallace’s own style at the same time. Beautiful review, and probably my pick for the best
I don't think I'll ever understand literature, or why people read it.
Give me the "shallow escapism" (or whatever Wallace called it; quoted near the beginning IIRC) sci-fi & fantasy over DFW's ponderous navel-gazing any day, I say!
Alas, the reviewer who lamented DFW's infinite footnotes is also a copious footnotes user. What an infinite jest!!!
The reviewer makes a brief connection between politics and literature. Let me say something here. I am almost entirely innocent to arts or literature, but recently I took an interest, because politics is all about compromise and saying what your audience wants to hear and I think people reveal their true colours more in art.
And I don't like what I am seeing. Before modernism, art was easy to understand. I mean look up the painting Washington crossing the Delaware. It is as easy to grasp as a Spider-Man comic book. You don't have to be educated to get it.
In my mind, modernism, say, Brancusi's bird statue, is entirely about snobbery: the average people will not get it, and they will say they will not get it, so you can separate yourself from the crowd by pretending to get it.
If I am right, art in the 100-120 years is all about separating yourself from the hoi-polloi. You pretend to understand a banan taped to the wall, they won't, and that is the entire purpose of taping a banana to a wall.
And this is alarming to me, because practically all artists and "art fans" are leftists, I am leftist too, I want compassion-based leftism, not superiority-complex based leftism. I want the kind of leftism that wants to make the world a kinder place, not the virtue-signalling or education-signalling kind.
Wasn't really familiar with DFW before reading this and I'm not really going to run out and start reading his stuff now but it definitely jives with my personal brand of the-rebels-are-posers post-postmodernism.
Can't be sure this is my favorite review so far but I look forward to finding out who wrote it so I can go look for other stuff they've written.
“True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer...
...The problem with all this, of course, is that in the middle of writing the book, he killed himself."
Heh. Yeah, that's a problem all right. Am I the only one who sees a striking resemblance between Wallace's "true heroism" and what an author's work life is like?
I think he paints too bleak a picture. Yes, one has to "be the best cog in the machine you can be" because that is what society requires in order to survive, but I don't think that's near enough. Be a good cog, but be more than just that. I think everyone needs a validating activity, something that provides respite in minor ways on a daily basis. Something unique to yourself that other people who know you can appreciate. You want something to remind people of you after you are gone.
Perhaps I am naive, but I find it hard to imagine that someone would seriously plan a murder, abuse a partner, or commit suicide if they were able to creatively express themselves through, say, carpentry.
This is an amazing 'review' that goes way beyond just talking about one book! Amazing. I've read most of Wallace's oeuvre, but have not made it through IJ and have not attempted TPK yet. But I will now. (I have a splendid first edition hardcopy of it). If this doesn't win the best review of the year, I want to see what does! Kudos to the author.
I actually just finished reading Infinite Jest yesterday by chance, and with the benefit of recent memory can say that there are definitely more than 3 female characters; it may be true that there are only a handful really important ones (that being Joelle Van Dyne, Avril Incandenza, and maybe Kate Gompert or Pat Montesian) but half of the tennis academy is composed of girls and many of them are named and have important moments in certain stories, mainly the Eschaton bit. There are also many female members of the Ennett Halfway house. Dozens of female characters really, I could list many of them.
Enjoyed this review a lot! But it doesn't make me want to read DFW.
It took me a while to realise that the review deliberately ends midsentence, in mirror of your material. I admire your audacity but
i ( biased that this is best book review considering I have Infinite Jest tattooed on fingers for https://imgur.com/a/Rhi8CEU ) was rereading The Gay (happy kind!) Science by Nietzsche and also half reading this when a lil synchronicity should happen:
> “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit."
was read right before my eyes turned heavenward (down) to book in my lap to read
> A Simile.—Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic orbits, are not the most profound. He who looks into himself, as into an immense universe, and carries Milky Ways in himself, knows also how irregular all Milky Ways are; they lead into the very chaos and labyrinth of existence.
which the whole Stars being stars thing being a motif in his work made me say aloud in the elevator to me pooch Doris who'd went peepee and poopoo
> One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
which I've always thought when hearing the question "why do geniuses kill themselves"... perhaps they are simply psychospiritual irradiating fusion producers who are destined to go suicidally supernova and then collapse into a neutron star, which, because of their gravity, bend light that approaches them or bends readers reading them
also regarding
> "nested footnotes—that the whole beautiful mess could become self-annihilating. I’ve heard people call his style called both maximalist and masturbatory—and while I lean, always, towards the charitable interpretations of Wallace, I do have to admit that it’s impossible to remain consistently absorbed in his work"
in Infinite Jest he wanted to mirror the constant vacillating back-and-forthèdness any addict will recognize... or a tennis match of course
" ‘It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’"
This very much reads like something that could have been written about any piece of the modern America I've come to know, from the 1920's on. Excepting the Great Depression, of course. It reminds me of a psychic doing a cold read, making generalized guess after guess until they strike a chord.
"In Wallace’s world, postmodernism and consumer culture form a wicked duo, the former reducing reality to discourse, and the latter papering over the resulting emptiness with a carnival of glittering distractions."
Excellent.