[HN Gopher] David Foster Wallace's final attempt to make art moral
___________________________________________________________________
David Foster Wallace's final attempt to make art moral
Author : lermontov
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-07-29 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Yikes, I had suppressed the memory of a terrible university prof
| I had who was obsessed with DFW, this instantly took me back.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I too hate when people like things a lot
| themisto wrote:
| I haven't read any books by David Foster Wallace, though every
| time he comes up I feel obliged to share a fantastic speech of
| his about finding joy in the monotony of life. I heard it years
| ago and it's always stuck with me. Video[1], transcript[2]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
|
| [2] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-
| david...
| zafka wrote:
| Thanks much for this! First time I have heard this. Now saved
| for repeats.
| [deleted]
| pcarolan wrote:
| Infinite Jest is feeling more prescient every day ( the titular
| theme is about media addiction ). Worth the steep climb.
| randycupertino wrote:
| I love his cruise ship essay.
|
| He's such a smug intellectual brat HOWEVER he's fully self-
| aware of his personality shortcomings and seems to set his
| qualms and enjoy himself despite of himself by the end.
|
| https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| This excerpt from The Pale King is powerful and I recommend it
| over the "This is Water" speech, esp for software developers:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ
|
| People laugh, and it is a bit funny, but it's also deadly
| serious.
|
| True heroism receives no ovation. It's just you against the
| world with no one to see or cheer.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| I have a calendar reminder to read this speech every 3 months.
| It's one of the few reminders that I actually listen to and
| don't just ignore.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| A great speech but this is the first I hear it interpreted as
| an ode to monotony. I've always thought of it as an essay on
| the value of questioning our default way of thinking in the
| day-to-day, on the implicit biases we carry with us into the
| world and how they can trap us in loneliness.
|
| Not ashamed to say I've cried more than once listening to it.
| It's a lifesaver.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The Pale King, his last novel (unfinished at the time of his
| death) is a really gorgeous elaboration on the same topics as
| This Is Water. It is not so much about rejecting the day to
| day monotony of the modern world, but rejecting the default
| _reaction_ to the monotony of the modern world. We have
| complete control over our reaction, and almost none over the
| reality. One line I'll paraphrase that sticks with me still:
| "In the modern world, if you can bear extreme boredom, there
| is literally nothing you can't accomplish."
|
| The general theme is that regardless of the monotonous
| reality, there's still plenty of beauty and intrigue to find
| within it if you look closely enough.
|
| To make this point, The Pale King is about an IRS agent and
| it includes long, meditative descriptions of turning the
| pages of extremely long tax forms. I don't know what
| philosophical ideas DFW ran into explicitly, i.e. whether he
| was reframing or actually deriving them, but he was
| absolutely rubbing up against what we now call mindfulness.
|
| Edit to add one of my favorite scenes in literature ever,
| with no spoiler or even narrative substance: There's a scene
| where two characters are talking to one another and one party
| becomes so engrossed by the conversation that he begins to
| literally levitate out of his chair. I find this such a
| simple description of a truly profound experience (~~flow
| state).
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Really good point, I might have misread the original
| commenter. Will pick up The Pale King this summer!
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's a great way to approach life in general. There's many
| things we have to do that we don't want to. Chores, etc.
| Like cutting the lawn.
|
| One approach can be to hate it and cut it super short and
| not take care of it and it slowly turns into a weed patch
| and something you resent even more. But you still have to
| get out there and cut it.
|
| Another approach is to learn about cultivation and care and
| take pride in it and think of the benefits like exercise
| and having a lawn you take pride in. You also open up the
| option to learn a lot of things.
|
| So now something that has to be done isn't something you
| dread because you were determined to find something good in
| it.
|
| If you can't find any way to take this approach with
| something then you have to make it not exist (don't have a
| lawn) or outsource it (pay landscaping company to cut it).
| floxy wrote:
| Getting off topic here, but is there a word for the concept of
| an anti-joke? Along with examples? As in, a joke consists of a
| setup story, and then there is a lull or pause, enough time for
| the listener to contemplate what going to happen next. And then
| the joke teller says something unexpected but somewhat related,
| and it is funny. There is a moment in the speech that I would
| classify as sort of the opposite. DFW starts relating about the
| ugly people sitting in traffic with the large SUVs with
| religious and patriotic bumper stickers, and the crowd starts
| cheering and laughing, seemingly agreeing that those "others"
| deserve mockery. But then there comes the punch line, that
| maybe the others have some worse hardship like bone cancer,
| which is definitely not funny. Or stated another way, for a
| joke, the setup story is neutral, and the after effect is
| funny. For the anti-joke, the setup is funny, and ends somber,
| and maybe makes you feel bad for laughing at the beginning? The
| anti-joke start at about 13:28:
|
| https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI?t=808
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| There is definitely the concept of the anti-joke. Anti-humour
| has the wiki page.
|
| The sadly-late Norm Macdonald was a good proponent.
|
| Fwiw though I watched this after your post and I'd say that's
| not really the same. I'm not sure what you call this
| technique in speeches with such a setup but it adds great
| emotional gravity and is something I see and appreciate a lot
| in speeches like this (or even shows like The Good Place
| which is incredible but can't be described further without
| spoilers).
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I want to second this recommendation.
|
| This commencement speech that Wallace gave is deeply moving and
| thought-provoking to me every time I listen to it -- and I have
| probably heard it at least 10 times.
|
| I have shared it with others, most of whom have had a very
| similar reaction to it.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| How should one interpret the speech in light of his suicide?
| [1] He didn't shoot his head which suggests that his mind
| wasn't a master. Still, it makes me a bit worried that his
| thoughts could be the structure that made him suffer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I agree this is a very complex matter to consider but I
| dwell on the parts where he emphasizes the degree to which
| his own "default thinking mode" was like everyone else's,
| any you can choose to either suffer it or manage it.
| npilk wrote:
| Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as
| consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs
| are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more
| accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start
| with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster:
| http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)
| xefer wrote:
| ...
| hammock wrote:
| Not to mention the pulleys and joists reasonably belong to
| the flagpole, not the flag or the rope (not to mention the
| rope doesn't belong to the flag, either)
| boldslogan wrote:
| Spoiler: don't read this unless spoiled
|
| But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the
| child was the funniest chapter of a book I've ever read. And I
| recommend this book based only on this one chapter.
|
| I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe
| something like it's always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama
| comes slightly close. But I've never laughed out loud from a
| book like that.
| nelsondev wrote:
| As for comedy in books, I find Bukowski - Post Office to be
| quite hilarious at times.
| rintakumpu wrote:
| The first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something
| as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow but ended up
| finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but
| so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi
| setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like
| you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those
| later.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I found Gravity's Rainbow more accessible and maybe that's
| because Infinite Jest was clearly inspired by it. They're
| both very similar in that you just have to power through the
| first 150-200 pages and then somehow everything starts making
| sense.
| havblue wrote:
| I think it helps to read summaries or explanations of
| infinite Jest and not just dig into it. Eventually you get a
| good mental picture of the entire timeline, the rough details
| of how the dystopia works and how the story is told in a
| loop.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Yea, I don't really get the take that it's inaccessible. The
| footnotes are sometimes annoying, but usually they're
| hilarious.
|
| I haven't read it in ~10 years but I think it's even more
| relevant, poignant, and hilarious today as it was then since
| we're just seeing more and more of his predictions about
| consumerism and self-image come to life.
| zerbin wrote:
| I agree, quite accessible, despite its length. I personally
| would not recommend skipping the footnotes. Though they are
| a pain, they frequently add so much color and deeply-
| nested, parenthetical humor to the book. Occasionally you
| need to look up a word (which is always worth it, because
| he really knows how to pick the right word), occasionally
| you get bored in the middle of one of "those" chapters
| (likely an inevitability that you get some ups and some
| downs in a 1,000+ page book).
|
| But I totally agree that it just gets more and more
| relevant and poignant. And completely hilarious. I think
| that part of the book (and his writing in general0 is
| undersold. Some of the passages are amusing because of
| their literary references and wordplay, some are laugh-out-
| loud funny, the type of stuff that you'll have to read back
| to someone else immediately because of the extreme mirth
| you just experienced reading it.
| numlocked wrote:
| As Dave Eggers says in his introduction to the 2006
| version of the book:
|
| > A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room
| with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who,
| just when he's about to push it too far, to try our
| patience with too much detail, has the good sense to
| throw in a good lowbrow joke.
| gizajob wrote:
| Gotta love the diddle checks
| rintakumpu wrote:
| Entertainment, addiction, corporate-sponsored years and
| tennis. It's still pretty relevant!
| ethanbond wrote:
| Predicting the rise of video calling and the backlash
| against having to look like you're paying attention and of
| being prettied up, solved by the face filters then people
| completely replacing themselves with virtual avatars?
|
| Incredibly prescient.
| nemo44x wrote:
| "Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume
| that the person on the other end was paying complete
| attention to you while also permitting you not to have to
| pay anything even close to complete attention to her"
| boucher wrote:
| I cannot imagine reading this book and skipping the
| footnotes.
| jbmny wrote:
| I've been roughly halfway through the book for years, so
| take this for what it's worth, but if they were actually
| footnotes I might have read them. Instead they are
| _endnotes_ , meaning you have to pick up a solid pound of
| book and flip to the end each time you encounter one. And
| there are many.
|
| I just found that dehumanizing. Lol
| numlocked wrote:
| DFW said somewhere (I can't recall where) that he wanted
| the reader to have the physical experience of moving back
| and forth, and that the process of moving and flipping
| sort of echoed the jumping between the years of the
| chapters and story. Or something :)
|
| I found it annoying initially, but after I read that
| (when I was maybe 1/3 through), I did come to appreciate
| it a bit more. Maybe I'm just impressionable.
| JonathanMerklin wrote:
| The endnotes are fundamental to the experience. There are
| some key plot points divulged or hinted at there first
| (and sometimes there exclusively, IIRC). Pemulis'
| funniest moments are back there. I still find my mind
| drifting to the description of Cage III: Free Show from
| J.O.I.'s filmography from time to time.
|
| If nothing else, I once read a comment somewhere online
| that noted that the constant back-and-forth from text to
| endnotes and back is physically analogous to a back-and-
| forth in a tennis match. If thematic consistency in the
| third dimension was actually something DFW was going for,
| it's a shame you're only seeing half of the court.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Cut the book in half, literally. Or even just cut the
| footnotes out and make them a separate book.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| You just need a second bookmark, and then you're good to
| go...
| rintakumpu wrote:
| I was so immersed in the book on my first read-through I
| ended up skipping the footnotes because I found jumping
| between them and the main text a bit jarring. At that point
| I was certain I'd read this one again so it was also fun to
| have something saved up for later!
| jrm4 wrote:
| Okay, I want to discuss a major thing in the book, but it's
| really spoilery. I don't know if hacker news has a thing for
| that? I'll ROT-13 it and if anyone wants to respond please
| do. Again, you shouldn't try to read this if you haven't read
| the book and dont want to be spoiled:
|
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| nemo44x wrote:
| Vg'f GvxGbx.
| frostburg wrote:
| Vg'f infgyl zber cbjreshy guna gung, ng yrnfg nccneragyl,
| ohg bar pbhyq frr n cnenyyry. Vs V erzrzore pbeerpgyl vg
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| unf fbzr xvaq bs pbaarpgvba gb gur zlfgrevbhf qeht QZM,
| gbb.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Bs pbhefr. Ohg V'ir whfg orra fgehpx ol ubj 'nfze' qvqa'g
| ernyyl rkvfg nf n guvat ng gur gvzr naq V guvax vs gur
| obbx unq pbzr bhg gbqnl vg jbhyq or boivbhf gung guvf vf
| jung vg jnf irel zhpu yvxr vs abg vqragvpny gb, naq ntnva
| -- fb sne V yvgrenyyl unir frra ab bar znxr gung
| pbaarpgvba. V whfg svaq gung cneg ernyyl fgenatr.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I first stumbled across the Pale King in my local library, and
| it was indeed enough to get me hooked and read first one of the
| collected essay books and then Infinite Jest.
| adam_ellsworth wrote:
| The link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find
| another copy here:
| https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...
| havblue wrote:
| I liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was
| basically a greatest hits of his best material including a
| decent chunk of Infinite Jest.
| mistersquid wrote:
| DFW's early short story "Forever Overhead" gives a sense of his
| potential and lyricism. [0]
|
| It's one of my favorites.
|
| [0]
| http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...
| Arubis wrote:
| I wish I could still love DFW's work the way I used to, but it's
| colored by [allegations of significant relational abuse](https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_...).
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I don't get how people can care about things like this. The
| American Constitution was written by slaveowners, and MLK
| cheated on his wife. It doesn't make the Constitution worthless
| nor does it make the I have a Dream speech a fraud. Never meet
| your heroes.
| Arubis wrote:
| Nuance! You can do better than black and white, good/bad
| binary decisions.
|
| I totally care about those other factors. And I am acutely
| aware of the effect that physical abuse has on real, actual
| people. It's unavoidable that this would effect my reading of
| someone's work.
|
| That the writers of the Constitution were morally fallible
| means they weren't the final authority, and we should be
| willing to grow. They had wisdom; we should take what we can
| of it, and take a nuanced view. This is no different from my
| take on DFW: there's art and learning to be had, but it's no
| longer the pure and innocent enjoyment I would have had prior
| to knowing how personally hurtful he could be.
|
| The MLK stuff is uncertain as yet; the FBI was clearly trying
| to blackmail him, but the records remain sealed. We'll know
| more in a couple years: https://www.archives.gov/publications
| /prologue/1997/summer/e...
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > it's no longer the pure and innocent enjoyment I would
| have had prior to knowing how personally hurtful he could
| be.
|
| All you crave is ignorance. The reality is that everyone
| has personal failings of some kind. All the bridges, all
| the books, all the artworks were made by imperfect people
| that were sometimes assholes.
| jquaint wrote:
| Yeah I totally agree. It doesn't invalidate his work but it
| adds quite an ick factor for sure.
| redtexture wrote:
| From the article.
|
| > Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace's
| friends...
|
| >...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish
| friend, a manipulative--and likely abusive--boyfriend, and a
| jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire
| to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing
| these things about him.
|
| > It's worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of
| Wallace's fiction, little of the news about his personal life
| could come as a surprise. Wallace's great subject was the
| morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and
| intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated,
| relatively privileged Americans would sink--and were sinking--
| unless they could find something to love more than they loved
| themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his
| contemporaries--one that sometimes opened him to charges of
| hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy
| sentimentalism--was his commitment to doing more than merely
| cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean
| that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did
| mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives
| like Fogle's, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.
| Arubis wrote:
| This is fair, and familiar. A common sensation over the last
| half-decade or so is to be shocked without being surprised.
|
| That this was a predictable facet of DFW's character doesn't
| make his purported actions less saddening and hurtful.
|
| It's okay--expected!--to struggle. It's common--awful, but
| repairable!--to hurt others in the process. The open question
| is whether that repair would have ever been available had he
| lived.
| rcktmrtn wrote:
| The fact that he killed himself colors every bit of his work to
| me. Whatever people may say about depression being a chemical
| phenomenon outside of our control, there will always be
| something perverse to me about learning why not to commit
| suicide from an author who did.
|
| That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I
| read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing
| who the author was.
| [deleted]
| platz wrote:
| > "Infinite Jest" transformed private torment into a vast
| metafictional diagnosis of our entertainment-bedizened cultural
| condition, and, weirdly, sounded the first notes of a quest for
| an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David's
| generation and the ones that followed. -
| http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis...
|
| > I sometimes wish Wallace had never written on irony or given
| that famous commencement address. Both are unfairly used as a
| stand-in for his entire ideology. He is in turn praised and
| totally dismissed by large groups of people who have no idea what
| his larger project as a writer really was. Also I'm pretty sure
| that he's made it abundantly clear that he never meant to say
| irony has no proper place in society, merely that it becomes a
| crutch and a shield for many who would rather not engage
| earnestly with the world. -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_han...
|
| https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-da...
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people
| CTmystery wrote:
| Reading this makes me feel quite insecure in my own comprehension
| of these books. I've read Pale King, Infinite Jest, Consider the
| Lobster, and Broom of the System. I liked them all. But I read
| this article and I don't really understand the majority of it,
| which makes me think that I also missed a lot of what I was
| supposed to take from the books. Genuine question, does this make
| sense to most readers? Do you need to be a literature major to
| understand this article?
| [deleted]
| thenerdhead wrote:
| If you watch some interviews with DFW and other similar
| authors, you may come to the conclusion that nobody really
| knows what they are talking about and it's usually the ego
| speaking(including Wallaces).
|
| I think that's the point of much of his works:
|
| > Wallace's great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-
| rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his
| cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink
| --and were sinking--unless they could find something to love
| more than they loved themselves.
|
| While the article makes sense to me, there's plenty of filler
| that detracts from the point. Wallace's work was writing moral
| fiction for a generation ahead of his time. Many of the themes
| in his work are more prevalent and pervasive today than they
| were at the time he wrote them.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Don't be. I don't think the author of this piece is saying much
| at all. I think they're doing a nerd thing of trying to insist
| that DFW had some "clear plan" that he was trying to execute.
| But I think what's really happening is that the author of the
| article wants there to be some clear plan instead of the truth
| that what DFW did with his amazing work defies summary in this
| way.
| swayvil wrote:
| To be fair, morality is just aesthetics in a more general
| context.
|
| Ie : This brush stroke is aesthetic. This deed is moral.
|
| Both boil down to feeling-of-rightness.
|
| But ya, that larger context. Maybe Dave is telling artists to get
| out of the studio.
| ww-picard-do wrote:
| https://archive.ph/LCzr8
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| Infinite Jest was largely a collection of various scenes, some of
| them recurring and some not.
|
| Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended
| conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop
| overlooking Tuscon. Marathe is a legless French Canadian agent of
| uncertain allegiance and Steeply is a US agent posing as a female
| reporter called Helen. Closely following the back-and-forth
| between the two allows the reader to put together major aspects
| of the grand narrative of the novel.
|
| My favorite scene was a one-off involving the younger kids (pre-
| teens) at a tennis academy playing an extraordinarily convoluted
| and physically intense game called Eschaton (think Risk played
| with tennis gear). If any particular thing made the 1,000 page
| slog worthwhile, I would say it had to be that.
|
| The footnotes alone could have made up an entire book.
| rockostrich wrote:
| > Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended
| conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop
| overlooking Tuscon.
|
| The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you will.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > My favorite scene [...] Eschaton [...]
|
| And a band that apparently has some David Foster Wallace fans
| amongst its members did a music video based on that chapter:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI (The Decemberists -
| "Calamity Song")
| dailyrorschach wrote:
| And directed by Office, Parks Rec, Good Place Mike Schur -
| who once definitely owned the film rights to Infinite Jest,
| not sure he still does or not.
| MissionInfl wrote:
| An additional Mike Schur Infinite Jest connection:
| https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/last-nights-parks-and-rec-
| wa...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Oh, that's what that was about (haven't gotten around to
| reading Infinite Jest). Love that song (Love most
| Decemberists songs), but couldn't quite figure out that
| video. Thank you.
| havblue wrote:
| The state farm insurance claim passage about the brick layer is
| great and doesn't depend on the rest of the book.
|
| http://infinitesummer.org/archives/608
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(page generated 2022-07-29 23:01 UTC)