dchaikin looking towards IJ

Yesterday I started Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. An IJ re-read will have to wait...maybe a long time.

Check list. * means I've read it.

*Read IJ once - read in 2010

Key influences to IJ or to DFW in general:
*Hamlet (~1601) - read in March, 2013, but kind of quickly
*Moby Dick (1851) - read in 2012
*Notes from the Underground (1864) - read in 2002, and again in 2010
*The Brothers Karamazov (1880)- read in 2010
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1918)
Ulysses (1922)
Omensetter's Luck by William H. Gass (1966)
"The Literature of Exhaustion" by John Barth (essay, 1967)
"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme, from Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968)
Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1968)
Thomas Pynchon
- The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
- Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)
Aberration of Starlight by Gilbert Sorrentino (1980)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (1988)

Jacques Derrida
Don Dellilo
Robert Coover
Joseph McElroy
Cynthia Ozick
A.M. Homes
Carole Maso
Flannery O'Connor
A.S. Byatt

Other books on DFW or with fictional versions of him:
Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell (2009)
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (2010)
Lit : a memoir by Mary Karr (2010, maybe also Liars' Club (1995), but not exactly for DFW)
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2011, maybe also The Corrections (2001), but not exactly for DFW)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2012)
*Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max (2012) - read in 2013
Conversations with David Foster Wallace by Stephen J. Burn (2012)

Online articles of note
- A Conversation with David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery - "The Review of Contemporary Fiction," Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&...
*- David Foster Wallace By Laura Miller (March 9, 1996): http://www.salon.com/1996/03/09/wallace_5/
- The Panic of Influence by A. O. Scott (Feb 10, 2000): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/feb/10/the-panic-of-influence/
- Kenyon College Address: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words
- Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library by Maria Bustillos (April 5th, 2011) http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-lib...
*- Just Kids by Evan Hughes (October 9, 2011): http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/

Other works by DFW:
The Broom of the System (novel, 1987)
Girl with Curious Hair (short stories, 1989)
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (on rap, or a rap or something like that. 1990)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essays, 1997)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (short stories, 1999)
Up, Simba! (??, 2000)
Everything and More (on logic, or philosophy or physics or something, 2003)
Oblivion: Stories (short stories, 2004)
Consider the Lobster (essays, 2005)
This Is Water (??, 2009)
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (??, 2011)
The Pale King (2011)
Both Flesh and Not (essays, 2012)

Read IJ again

IJ reader guides:
Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest by Greg Carlisle (2007)
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide by Stephen Burn (2007, 2nd edition 2012. Only OK, per EF)

This is all pleasantly fanciful.

Can you remind me why Godel, Escher, Bach is of importance here dan?

I'm in freeform book collecting mode today - take care as your reply might cost me money.

I only have a short answer - D.T. Max has a nice footnote on it in the early part of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. He mentions how impressed the then college-age DFW was with it and and he connects it to IJ. Also, I've wanted to read it for a while.

You know, Dan, I don't think reading Pynchon is absolutely vital for Wallace studies. Maybe so for The Broom of the System, which is pretty obviously derivative of Pynch w/the names and just general whimsy and humor of it all, but by the time of IJ, he's just a peripheral influence, if an influence at all, even though there are some allusions to Gravity's Rainbow. I think of Pynchon's contemporaries, John Barth was just as equally an influence on Wallace, at least stylistically, and certainly one Wallace felt the need to respond to directly in the final story from Girl With Curious Hair, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way," a response to Barth's "The Literature of Exhaustion". And Wallace has mentioned Robert Coover and Joseph McElroy as being writers he admired from that same maximalist generation as well. Really didn't mean to add more you're going to have to read! ;-)

Reader's guides that have been essentials for me, that I've gone back to time and time again: Elegant Complexity and Understanding David Foster Wallace.

There's also David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest that's okay but not as great as the other two.

I'd wait on Both Flesh and Not: Essays as almost all of those essays are available online. Two of them I've linked in this thread, and hope to have the majority of them linked there soon.

For Pynchon, I'd think V. as much or more than Gravity's Rainbow. Also remember, while writing Broom, every time he went to the bathroom, he was literally surrounded by the Ulysses written on the walls. Somehow that rubs off. But, most of all, Shakespeare. And Moby Dick.

Someday, I will break apart the interwoven stories in each of them, and recast them like the Crab Canon on a Mobius strip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU

Thanks, both! Still, need to read Pynchon sometime, right?

Ulysses...I haven't even read Homer's version...will have to wait.

Barthes...will consider

Robert Coover & Joseph McElroy - these names don't mean anything to me. Help?

Reader guides will join my next IJ read.

Moby Dick? The connection isn't clicking...at least not yet.

There aren't any females referenced on this thread...

Biographically: His father read his sister and he Moby Dick as a kid (the Dad read his wife Ulysses, so there's that again); it was a book imprinted on him from a young age, and remained deeply formative for him.

Textually, of course, there are the footnotes...

And, then, the structure. Both books begin at the end. It doesn't end there.

Both books depict searches for something fatal and enigmatic.

Then there is the madness.

And the obsessive attempt to describe the American.

And the madness.

No females above. Of course, you have trouble finding a female in Moby Dick. Though there is the Innkeeper. And the cap'n's widow.

Good stuff, Sam. I will keep all that in mind.

I feel the need to mention that IJ does have women...fully characterized, 3-dimensional women.

Indeed, it all breaks down somewhere. In terms of women writers, though, I can't think of someone I'd think of as a big influence on DFW. Surely Master Freeque can?

DFW loved women too! A lot of them (according to the DT Max bio), before he got married.

The only influence from Pynchon's generation comes to mind would be Cynthia Ozick. He admired a ton of his contemporaries, A.M. Homes & Carole Maso come immediately to mind. In his Salon interview from '96, he mentions a ton more, Kathryn Harrison, I think, was another. Better yet, here's that Salon interview. Down about halfway in the interview, he lists a bunch: Flannery O'Connor & A.S. Byatt too.

I forgot that William H. Gass was also a huge influence -- a philosopher turned author/literary essayist that Wallace for a time considered modeling his own career after, what with his own philosophy background.

8> Here's a nice piece on Joseph McElroy: The Lost Postmodernist.

I'll try and find something good on Robert Coover tomorrow.

Hmmm, according to Max, Mary Karr had quite an influence on DFW.

Goodness, thanks EF! I think I've read that Salon interview, but might read it again. And I'll look forward to reading that article on McElroy.

beelzebubba - I'll find the reference soon enough, assuming it's in Max's biography.

Poor McElroy. That Salon interview of DFW is fantastic. I've read parts before, but i don't think i had read the whole thing before.

True re. McElroy. But poor reading public for their loss in neglecting such a masterful maximalist.

Oh no, don't tell me there's ANOTHER 1000+ pages incomprenhensible book I have to read!!!

Not that the incomprehensible part bothers me too much. I never understand anything I read anyway.

Oh yes, there is another, Florence, and its name is Women and Men. Did you catch that statistic in the article that it has something like 400,000 more words than War and Peace? Not daunting in the least. Though it's kind of pricey to come by these days, as Dalkey Archive let it go out of print. Hopefully they'll reissue it. Getting a copy for under $100 is a feat, even in paperback.

13,14> Yeah, biggest influence is right, in more ways than one, Mary Karr.

18: "Kind of pricey" - no kidding. 90€ on amazon.fr for the paperback version, and 220-something for the hardback. I pushed the "I want to read this book on Kindle" button but I won't be holding my breath.

"Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around his characters."

This is from Sven Birkerts about DFW's short story Little Expressionless Animals, as quoted in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.

Lovely! And so true. This is what I was trying to convey when I said IJ was made up of all these little vignettes. I have not read Little Expressionless Animals but I think it relates to his overall writing style.

I know there's a great master's thesis or PhD dissertation on IJ online somewhere. If anyone wants to post link, I'll add it to my post #2 above.

Yesterday I started Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. An IJ re-read will have to wait...maybe a long time.

Kind of a gloss on the life, methought.

As for the Pynchon/DFW thing, I'd probably call Lot 49 the book to look at.

On DFW's life? Anyway, Hi, and I will keep Lot 49 in mind.

I may have offered this previously, but I really liked the stories in Pynchon's collection Slow Learner.

I'd add Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. Five day interview w/Wallace on his book tour for Infinite Jest.

Delillo? Ratner's Star, White Noise. The Harry Ransom Center has copies of DFWs Delillo books all marked up, page after page. Forget which titles they are exactly.

Slick & EF, Thanks! The Lipsky book is on that list now.

Pynchon and Delillo have too many books of interest to list. I'll keep all this in mind. White Noise gets a lot of high praise in those best books of the century lists. (For Pynchon it's Gravity's Rainbow, of course. And that's on my to-read-someday list with or without this IJ project).

Some quotes from "Every Story is a Ghost Story" - Part 1

Life for him had the quality of a performance...

One thing that caught Wallace's eye about the book* was the idea that to live in America was to live in a world of confusion, where meaning was refracted and distorted, especially by the media that engulf and reconfigure every gesture

*The Crying of Lot 49

...Wittgenstein* seemed to be saying what he was thinking and Pynchon writing: that experience was a game, that people were all and ever radically disconnected.

*in Philosophical Investigations

Mythopoeic - the making of myth

...

"No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, arm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to decolletage, understood in terms of thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way.... I admit to seeing myself as an aestetician of the cold, the right, the truly and spotlessly here." - from "Here and there", an early short story

...

...the paradoxical approach that would come to dominate Wallace's later fiction: a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentaciously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings.

...

Wallaces's suggestion is clear: advertising and metafiction share the same goal, to lull by pleasing, to fatten without nourishing. - about "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way"

Some quotes from "Every Story is a Ghost Story" - Part 2 (directly about Infinite Jest)

"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." - from Lewis Hyde writing on John Berryman and alcohol

"This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. it's critical and destructive, a ground clearing...{I}rony's...singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks" - Wallace's response to Hyde

The stance was nearly a complete turnaround for a young writer who has made his identity as a clown and then a parodist and whose gifts as a "weird kind of forger" hardly depended on clarity of intent. suddenly, in his eyes, sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a callling. Nostalgia seemed to play a part, as well as discontent with the person he had grown up to be, the two intertwined - Max's response to the above. A key part of the way to IJ.

...

If reality was fragmented, his book should be too. It was also in keeping with Wallace's insistence that the story not be so amusing that it re-create the disease he was diagnosing. It must not hook readers too easily, must not allow them to fall into the literary equivalent of "spectation." Infinite Jest had to be, as he titled it, "a failed entertainment." To the extent the novel was addictive, it should be self-consciously addictive. That was one reason he'd structured the story like a Sierpinski gasket, a geometrical figure that can be subdivided into an infinite number of identical geometrical figures. The shape of the book—following Wallace's natural cast of mind—was recursive.

...

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer—a very talented one, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory—into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values. - from Wallace's review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky, published in the Voice Literary Supplement

Hyperc{onsciousness} makes life meaningless {…}: but what of will to construct OWN meaning? Not the world that gives us meaning but vice versa? Dost embodies this—Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers—they do not. Their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has BALLS. - from Wallace's notebooks.

...

This book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are.

...

He was becoming a beacon for a kind of writing, not the postmodermnism of the rest of the department* and not the realism of Iowa and everywhere else, but a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real

*at Illinois State

Very interesting quotes Dan, thank you.

You're welcome. There will be a part 3 eventually. I don't know when though...

Some quotes from "Every Story is a Ghost Story" - Part 3

"Writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there's so much!" - from a personal letter

...

DFW's list of underappreciated novels: Omensetter's Luck, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Blood Meridian, Steps

...

{A. O.} Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. - about Scott's essay "The Panic of Influence" in the New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/feb/10/the-panic-of-influence/

...

"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. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… - from a notebook, maybe referencing Oblivion

...

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master" - Kenyon College Address, 2005

Over the past 25 years his mental life had run a huge circuit through the most astonishing complexities to arrive at what many six-year-olds and nearly all churchgoers already understood. - Max's comment on the Kenyon Address.

...

In 2007, Timothy Jacobs, a Canadian scholar, wrote a thoughtful paper marking out the links between The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest. The parallels are multiple, both being novels about a father and his three sons. Orin Incandenza corresponds to Dmitry Karamazov, the nihilistic oldest brother; Hal is Ivan; and Mario is the stand-in for Alyosha Karamazov, the simple, almost holy youngest son, with his “foolish grin” and refusal to lie. Like “the good old Brothers K,” as Wallace called Dostoevsky’s novel, Infinite Jest counterposes sincerity and faith against moral lassitude. Both eschew stylish irony to make a single point: faith matters.

Some quotes from "Every Story is a Ghost Story" - Part 4 - from the notes

‘He had read Paul De Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and wrote “brilliant” when he came upon the following disquisition on authorship:

“The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification.”’

...

"rap resolves its own contradictions by genuglecting to them" - something Wallace wrote, not clear where.

...

The addicts' time a Ennet House is in some way therapy for an overdose of consumerism

That's interesting about the parallels with The Brothers Karamazov.

Also Alvin & the Chipmunks.

32: I read about DFW's Five Direly Underappreciated Novels in The Salon.Com Reader. He argued their merits most persuasively and I'm planning to read them all, picking up copies whenever I come across them (so far I've only got Steps). Has anyone around here read some of those books?

36> Also read Steps. I'm pretty sure Denis Johnson's first novel, Angels was on that list of his, but didn't see it above. Thought it was excellent. Read Wittgenstein's Mistress and was pretty much mystified by it. Enjoyed Blood Meridian. Haven't yet read Gass' first novel.

#36/37 thanks nymith. Max only listed four...was the fifth Angels? I recall Denis Johnson getting a mention somewhere in the book, don't recall the context.

Waiting for Godot, IJ hasn't arrived yet

38> Yeah it was Angels. Here's the Salon mini-essay Wallace wrote (it's also included in Both Flesh and Not): http://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/

Tractatus...I don't even know the question to ask. Where do I begin? How do I go about approaching it? So far everything i've read is either a very broad summary (wikipedia "It was an ambitious project: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science") or complete gibberish to me, even if it's meant to be very basic...

From here : http://paradigm-shift-21st-century.nl/mini-tractatus.htm

"1. A mind-world is a logical space containing only 'pictures' called 'statements' or 'propositions'. All these pictures reveal independent basic statements"

What does this mean? What is it negated with "only"? What is and what isn't within this definition. Why are these pictures independent? Why is that important? What does this say about the limits of anyone's mind-world anyway? The purpose seems to be that there are mind-worlds and we each seem to have one, but they don't interact so well and one doesn't know how to see what is seen within another mind-world. ie...there are things that simply can't be seen because they are outside the bounds of one's mind-world. But how would we know that is true anyway? I mean maybe one just needs to stretch one's mind-world and - voilà...

Introducing Wittgenstein by John Heaton & illustrated by Judy Groves - I'm starting to get it.

Now reading Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction by A. C. Grayling. I seem to be gaining something on tractatus. Thoughts coming if I find time.

A random thoughts in response to my limited and developing (mis?)understanding of Wittgenstein.

- What is a thought?
- Does a thought lie outside language? I think it does.

Wittgenstein is pointing at something he isn't saying, something unspoken.
- There is something outside our language and our (language-dependent) world concepts.
- He is leading us to glimpse of what this is.
- It requires a mental transform, or reconstruction. Something spiritual, it seems.
- This transform or reconstruction lies outside language

So
- It's a tough place to reach
- or to maintain
- It's impossible to communicate
- It has value

What does this lead to?

My unreflective brainstorming:
- Love, emotions, the non-meaning of life
- getting by
- remaining mentally stable
- death
- Things people do that can't be explained in language.
- As in things that happen in certain kinds of relationships.
- The things that lead to a distortion of reality - like Steve Jobs, or salesmen, or religion.

Back to love.
- If you don't understand, just love. Love god, the world, your spouse, art, everybody, anybody, whatever.
- "I love you all" - from the note Robert Smith leaves in the opening of Song of Solomon before he does his Icarus like plunge, which, if I understand correctly, we later find has do with a haunting of Sunday, which would be significant. But Icarus represents human limits. In context it could represent something like an African-American glass ceiling. But it can also mean reaching the limits of understanding humanity, or other people whose thoughts we can't see, or even of understanding ourselves - our inability to understand our own thoughts.
- If you don't understand, just love.

I follow, except - Steve Jobs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Distortion_Field

: )

Your thoughts were cogent enough that I had something like that in mind - but less fully developed and without the snappy acronym! Thanks for clarifying!

Slick - it's a good thing to know someone else thinks that post makes some kind of sense. Not clue what the snappy acronym is. I'm slowly making my way through Steve Jobs' biography, at something like an hour reading a week, and developing like/hate relationship, or a highly respectful dislike, or something like that. He was impressive, regardless. Also reading Morrison, which seems far away from IJ...but I'm getting a lot out of it. So, in a sense I'm simply applying what is at hand. But, it's working enough. Never thought I would get anything out of Tractatus, now I'm am and I haven't even read it yet.

Wow, that is really interesting about Jobs. Huh. Never thought of reading that bio, but it sounds like it is worthwhile.

Sorry, I'd transformed the term into RDF in my own distortion field.

Slick, makes sense to me.

Anna - Steve Jobs is a pretty amazing story. The writing is light and fast.