David Foster Wallace -- for Lance

well lance, i brought the thread over here.


what did i like about IJ? i loved the fact that it ended so abruptly, yet i wanted to read the whole thing over again (i did read it again, but not right away). i loved his writing style, much for the same reasons you say you did. he uses a stream of consciousness style of writing, and gets the reader involved on such a level that his communication of his ideas are more effective, and better understood. these are the marks of a good storyteller. his command and usage of the english language makes you think, and understand at a deeper level exactly what he is thinking.


the opening scene in the book, where Hal is reduced to near-catatonia, you can't help but wonder what the hell is going on. i think that Hal has ingested the DMZ and it is causing this kind of a reaction. it is sort of the culmination of his drug habits. he is consistently taking drugs (mostly marijuana), and paranoid as hell about getting caught. thus, he is always covering up. but his guard has been dropping, and he seems to care less and less about getting caught, and about his tennis game and career. perhaps the DMZ is a final statement of 'I give up. i want to experiment more with this, and ill be damned if i let the game of tennis keep me from checking out this DMZ-stuff.' the book obviously has a lot of drug content, and explores all different sides of drug use and abuse. some of the Ennet House Residents are my favorite characters. Lenz just cracks me up, as a character. and then theres Joelle, who we all know is the PGOAT (what a term!!). i love her radio show. i love how Mario's underdeveloped sense of social acceptance has allowed his art sensibility to stay keen and cutting edge. I love the guy torn between answering his phone and answering the door. i love Eschaton. i love Lyle, and the fact that he lives off of sweat. i love the fact that the students don't see him as some weirdo, and actually GO TO HIM for advice. i love a lot of the jokes that Pemulis makes (it was him that made the crack about "...how 17 goes into 53 way more than 3.11764 times..."). i love the story about the kids who jump in front of the trains (Ils Fateuil Rollents, or their predecessor, i believe). The Moms' obsession for spelling and grammar are great. The Mad Stork's filmography is really cool. i like that it is too highbrow to be seriously intellectual, yet that it was just James having fun with an audience.


i love the conversations between Steeply and Marathe. their discussion of the nature of entertainment is classic. the whole US-Canadian relations is absolutely brilliant. i also love that the guy took his time, and didn't mind using 1000+ pages to tell this story. i like how almost all of the characters have a different style to their part of the story. i.e. - when DFW is narrating a section about Marathe, he uses a broken Quebec version of english. when he tells about Gately, he uses words that a big, dumb, sensitive guy in a 12-step program would use. i like how you can tell that the author has some serious experience with marijuana use. and tennis.

1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - this book is pretty cool. its a bunch of essays that DFW had written for different journalistic 'assignments' from a bunch of publications. the title essay is my favorite. he still uses footnotes to tell his story better, which i like. he has a pretty cool view on the whole experience of taking a luxury cruise, which i dig very much. oddly enough, i just re-read that last week. yesterday, i was talking to my grandparents about the luxury cruise that they just came back from. its hilarious, because half the stuff they thought was so wonderful DFW talks about and dissects, and makes fun of. the rest of it is pretty cool too, though i skipped the discussion of David Lynch.


2. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - I like this book. I read it so long ago that i don't recall all the things i liked about it. but the stuff in here is his most cohesive fiction after Infinite Jest.


3. Girl With Curious Hair - some shorter fiction stuff. kind of hard to get into, but worth a read.


4. Broom Of The System - easier to get into, but it just sort of ended. i didn't feel like anything REALLY happened in this book. still worth a read.

Haven't read anything by Wallace except for his essay about tennis in Best American Sports Writing (which is terrific, I think), so I'm going to read his other essays. Thanks.


John

too bad for everyone else.

Here's a link to a DFW essay that I think you might like.

Another thing that I thought was really cool: DFWs ability to augur a crisis in the advertising industry and the demise of network televison in the face of "Teleputers" that can record broadcast TV and edit out the commercials.


A couple weeks ago in the NYT there was an article in which, if you substitute "TPs" for "TiVo", you basically had IJs section on the rise of InterLace. DFW might have exaggerated some other USA cultural trends for satire, but he seems to have hit that one right on the nose.


I think IJ is engaging because it is like life. It's long (well, hopefully it is). You meet a lot of people along the way, some are interesting, some aren't. A fair amount of interesting events occur along the way. Some of the interesting events continue develop across the course of your life/the book. Some things happen and then don't continue to develeop, even though you kinda wish they would. You are just left with fond memories of these episodes, but don't really know how they were resolved. And some events seem relatively minor (deciding to smoke that first joint) when they occur, but have tremendous repercussions throughout your life/the book.


Another great joke from IJ: the original Latin motto of ETA, which DFW translated to "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier."

Now who is John Cole?


eLROY

He really knows his tennis. if you enjoyed it, check out ASFTINDA and Infinite Jest.

excellent quote.


i agree with you that IJ reveals itself a bit like life. it almost always ends before tying up everything you'd like to. you meet lots of people that you want to get to know more, but they just don't have the kind of influence on you that you wish they would.