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Nobody can tell me Mario is dishonest. 
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Aug 25, 2010 12:31
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I wish I had drawing talent so i could draw Marios outward appearance. DFW's love of physical deformity had me cracking up, it just piles on to absurd lengths and puts the goofiest mental image in your mind. I have a lot of theories as to why DFW likes deformity so much, but the simplest is that its such a natural seriously funny/unfunny thing in the hands of a good writer.
meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Aug 26, 2010 |
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Aug 25, 2010 23:40
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meanolmrcloud posted:I wish I had drawing talent so i could draw Marios outward appearance. DFW's love of physical deformity had me cracking up, it just piles on to absurd lengths and puts the goofiest mental image in your mind. I have a lot of theories as to why DFW likes deformity so much, but the simplest is that its such a natural seriously funny/unfunny thing in the hands of a good writer. You can find one here if you scroll down, also a short anecdotal about the artist and DFW http://thepaincomics.com/weekly080917.htm
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Aug 26, 2010 01:02
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I read Infinite Jest last year and was hooked from the first chapter. My copy had the little intro by Dave Eggers in the beginning, which was a little painful to read, but Eggers mentioned something about DFW constructing perfect sentences. I thought, 'yeah yeah yeah', but I kind of tripped and fell in love while keeping Eggers' praise in mind. The last book of his I read was Broom of the System, which was frankly a little depressing. I felt that the main character, Lenore, was dealing with an incredible amount of manipulation by everyone in her life, and instead of dealing with it on any level just rationalizes her position, with the encouragement of the elder Lenore, which was pretty frustrating. It seemed like she was trying to atone for something by having a lovely job and a giant creep/manchild of a boyfriend, one that she isn't even attracted to. I just couldn't figure out what it was. Also in IJ, I thought that the master was hidden with the Stork because of the scene with Hal and Gately digging up his grave, but then it seemed like Orin had it. The cartridge sent out to the medical attache was from the city Orin is based from (I believe, don't have the book on me), and there are hints through-out the book that the Moms was having an affair with that same medical attache. Orin's sexual overcompensating and grandstanding seems to be connected to him finding that footprint on the windshield, i.e. him discovering his mother's affairs/having a sexual relationship with the Moms, and then instead of siding with the Stork internalizes the Moms behavior and flaunts it to the world, in some kind of cry to end some of the silence that overwhelms the entire family. So it is possible that Orin digs it up first and uses it to get some kind if revenge for his father after death, since he clearly thought the world of his dad or at least was eager to impress him via the PGOAT.
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Aug 26, 2010 07:35
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heliotroph posted:The last book of his I read was Broom of the System, which was frankly a little depressing. I felt that the main character, Lenore, was dealing with an incredible amount of manipulation by everyone in her life, and instead of dealing with it on any level just rationalizes her position, with the encouragement of the elder Lenore, which was pretty frustrating. It seemed like she was trying to atone for something by having a lovely job and a giant creep/manchild of a boyfriend, one that she isn't even attracted to. I just couldn't figure out what it was. She takes the job to break away from her family. She doesn't want to be with Vigorous, but she doesn't have control over her life and just ends up with him. Plus RV tells good stories. edit- I didn't get that she was rationalizing her position. Remember when LaVache says he created this wastoid personality the Antichrist? He says something to the effect of creating it so that he wouldn't feel educed and have a set understanding of where others end and he begins. That's what Lenore was going for when she took the lovely call center position. She has a job at the Stoneciphico corporation if she wants, but she needs to quit being whatever her family tells her she is. She fails at this, of course, and her being with Ricky V is just happenstance. It's just another thing she has no say in. She's also not as aware as LaVache, of her position or how she can escape it. It's kind of ironic that what she needs is to become herself instead of what other people tell her she is, but only realizes it after having someone else tell her that this is what she needs to do. Of course, she doesn't do this, allowing "Texas" to guide her away from all these controlling characters who show up at the end of the book. flavaaDAAAAAVE fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Aug 26, 2010 |
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Aug 26, 2010 16:31
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Thanks to some recommendations in this thread (and DFW, of course), I started reading Franzen's "The Corrections" and it's riveting thus far. I look forward to seeing how each character's strange neuroses will end up playing out, as my favorite aspect of IJ is the strange, nuanced behavior that defines each character. How much of influence did Franzen have on DFW and vice versa? I know they were really close friends, but beyond that I haven't a clue.
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Aug 28, 2010 03:15
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I finished IJ a few years ago, can somebody please refresh my memory regarding the master?: How does Hal (or whoever) know the master should be in Himself's head? Did Himself request that the master be buried in his head in his will? That would explain how Hal knows where it should be and how Orin presumedly would have gotten it before it was buried. Also, how did people who also read Elegant Complexity do it? (Both books at the same time, one after the other, etc.?) I eventually read both (for the first time) at the same time, and now sort of regret it. I wish I had just plowed through IJ without trying to take copious notes or reading Elegant Complexity, and then tried to sort it all out at the end.
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Aug 28, 2010 05:25
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Jirolico posted:Thanks to some recommendations in this thread (and DFW, of course), I started reading Franzen's "The Corrections" and it's riveting thus far. I look forward to seeing how each character's strange neuroses will end up playing out, as my favorite aspect of IJ is the strange, nuanced behavior that defines each character. I actually just started reading The Corrections too and it's amazing how much Franzen reminds me of Wallace sometimes. Great book and I can't wait to keep reading. Also started Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and I am in love with it so far: the dialogue about the guy telling his girlfriend he has a horrible habit of pulling out of any loving, committed relationships after working so hard to establish them is such a mindfuck. There's a line where he goes something to the effect of: Oh, baby, I love you so much and I'm only telling you this to warn you and make sure you don't get hurt by me so don't take it the wrong way and I'm definitely not trying to scare you and make you to pull out instead of me for once, at least I think I'm not. There are some seriously hosed up people in that book.
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Aug 28, 2010 17:27
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Edged Hymn posted:There are some seriously hosed up people in that book. The thing that always gives me the jeebies when I read BIWHM is that I know any number of people who would say the kind of things the hideous men say. Not all in one person, thank God, but each interview is like an amalgam of all the terrible ways I see us treat each other every day. Sometimes in my darker times I think Dave might have had the right idea. Maybe that's just because I've spent all day being bombarded on Facebook by Glenn Beck's know-nothings, but still... Edit: I don't mean to trivialize the pain he obviously felt, and I know his illness came from somewhere more foundational and troubling and innate than just the ennui of daily life. Maybe that means I'm not as strong as he was, which on reflection is almost certainly true.
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Aug 28, 2010 19:35
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I like to think in BIWHM he was channeling a lot of the pain and frustration the actions of the people around him aroused. Given his stated goal of writing "passionately moral fiction" or whatever it was, I would imagine a lot of his depression stemmed from how he viewed the people and their interactions in the world around him.
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Aug 28, 2010 21:26
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Jirolico posted:Thanks to some recommendations in this thread (and DFW, of course), I started reading Franzen's "The Corrections" and it's riveting thus far. I look forward to seeing how each character's strange neuroses will end up playing out, as my favorite aspect of IJ is the strange, nuanced behavior that defines each character. The article in Time on Franzen expands on the friendship between the two. The full article was recently posted on the website: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000,00.html.
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Aug 31, 2010 16:47
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Groundskeeper Silly posted:I finished IJ a few years ago, can somebody please refresh my memory regarding the master?: How does Hal (or whoever) know the master should be in Himself's head? Did Himself request that the master be buried in his head in his will? That would explain how Hal knows where it should be and how Orin presumedly would have gotten it before it was buried. It's a mixture of the wraith and dream telling Gately, plus Joelle was aware of the will. But it's more than that: "inside his head" or "buried after he dies", have other interpretations than just simply "it was buried with him". DFW is planting seeds of doubt that a. it existed, b. it actually was lethal.
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Aug 31, 2010 23:50
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Someone above mentioned that Franzen was friends with Wallace, and the AV Club just posted an interview in which they ask him about Wallace reading his work, influence in writing about depression, etc. He seems noticeably uncomfortable talking about it:quote:I actually didn’t need Dave to have some experience with the ins and outs of non-major hospitalized depression, but nonetheless, I know a thing or two about it. I did not need to consult with Dave about it. Dave—it’s a funny thing. The book was just getting going. I finally wrote the first pages for the book the days he was making his real first serious suicide attempt in the summer of 2008. He was not in the position to be reading anything that summer. But the book got written, to some extent, in emotional response to his death, certainly. But the depression stuff? There’s some of that in The Corrections, too. This is the first serious thing of mine Dave hasn’t read. And it feels really weird not to be able to call him up on the phone.
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Sep 1, 2010 14:38
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Le Sean posted:No, yeah, but seriously. Honestly, I didn't ever like it, I kept reading and reading becuase I really dug the footnotes and the whole experimental novel feel to it, but I got to about page 850 and realized that I had been bored half of the time and revulsed the other half, so I put it down without finishing it. I'm not going to rag on anyone for liking it, my girlfriend loves it and was the person who gave it to me to read, but you're not alone if you didn't like it.
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Sep 1, 2010 17:43
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Elim Garak posted:Honestly, I didn't ever like it, I kept reading and reading becuase I really dug the footnotes and the whole experimental novel feel to it, but I got to about page 850 and realized that I had been bored half of the time and revulsed the other half, so I put it down without finishing it. I'm not going to rag on anyone for liking it, my girlfriend loves it and was the person who gave it to me to read, but you're not alone if you didn't like it.
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Sep 1, 2010 18:25
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WoG posted:You know, I've given up on a book or two in my time, but never at 87% of the way through. I have never either, I was actually convinced to. I had jury duty this summer and I read basically from the Eschaton match through JOI visiting Gately in the hospital room (so maybe not 850 pages, maybe like 800? That is the last sequence I remember, anyway) in four or five days. I got home on the last day and remarked to my girlfriend that I had basically been bored and revolted with the book that entire time. She actually understood the revolted feeling but told me that if I had been bored with the rest that it probably wasn't worth reading through to the end.
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Sep 1, 2010 19:35
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I just started reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again right after finishing The Broom of the System. I'm probably the last one to the party in this thread, but this essay is hilarious. I almost never laugh out loud when I'm reading a book because then I have to try to explain what I thought was funny to whoever else might be in the room, and it usually doesn't work, but I've had several instances where I can't stop myself. Also, these two pieces of writing were written for different audiences, for different purposes, and are completely different in every way, but it is nevertheless interesting to see how DFW's style changed over the decade separating the two.
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Sep 1, 2010 20:36
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fake edit: /\ /\ I read it about once a year. It's like taking a vacation. Grab Lobster, too. As soon as I don't like a book, I put it down no matter how far I am through it. I never did as a kid, and I know I'm not unique in that way. My attention span and something running more toward span of tolerance are much much shorter. Taste varies. Just because I like IJ better than any other book doesn't mean everyone else should. I'm fine with people who don't like the book chiming in, too, but substantiating what you don't like makes it a little more interesting than a single flip comment about how much it sucks. Not that you're doing that, Elim Garak, but Le Sean's comments don't tell anyone what's boring him. DFW's prose is like a circus to me. I giggle and clap, inwardly, at the show. If that part of it doesn't grab you, I could totally see not liking any of his stuff.
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Sep 1, 2010 20:39
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bort posted:
I've only read IJ, but this really does sum up the feeling I get reading that. I found it an easy read and I'm perplexed at why people find it "hard": the language is beautiful, the stories moving, the images he conjured powerful. Though postmodern, this isn't Gravity's Rainbow level of abstract torture. Maybe it's that the plot was secondary for me, and the minutiae of the character descriptions are what made it extraordinary. I absolutely revelled in the character level stories and though the fact that they fitted into the story added, they had life beyond just "boring" details.
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Sep 1, 2010 21:08
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knees of putty posted:I've only read IJ, but this really does sum up the feeling I get reading that. I found it an easy read and I'm perplexed at why people find it "hard": the language is beautiful, the stories moving, the images he conjured powerful. Though postmodern, this isn't Gravity's Rainbow level of abstract torture. Maybe it's that the plot was secondary for me, and the minutiae of the character descriptions are what made it extraordinary. I absolutely revelled in the character level stories and though the fact that they fitted into the story added, they had life beyond just "boring" details. The thing I found hard, almost to the point of quitting it was the shifting between characters and voices. Especially the section early on in the YTSDB starting with "Wardine say her momma ain't treat her right..." I was probably 18 when I first read IJ and came from a background of sci-fi and fantasy and whatever fiction was taught in school, so all the stylistic stuff was very new to me. After a while I just stopped questioning how weird it was and that I was listening to a janitor deliver a monologue to his pal about how sex is essentially "hunched" and generally distasteful to him. You gotta laugh at those strange insights and points of view, in between the sorrow that is.
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Sep 1, 2010 21:43
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Just stared IJ, and wow, it sure is something else. Really unlike any of the other classics I've read like Humboldt's Gift.
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Sep 1, 2010 22:21
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I'm actually enjoying the book a lot more at this point, I'm about 300 pages in. My initial question of 'when does this get good' was more of a 'when does this book hook you'; every book has got it, and I'm doing a lot of reading these days so it's something I'm on the lookout for. Some authors hook you with their style immediately, some with their plots a third of the way through, some with characters or themes or topics by page 30 or 300 or..., etc. After that first section, things were barren for a while. You have to admit,fancy vocab, describing things mathematically, and crunching thought into daisy-chains running multiple pages is a bit of a slough until you know you can trust what the writer is doing, really sort of see it. I'd probably say it started clicking around page 80 for me, basically that one section that has you look at the endnotes at the 30 or so attempted movies. Reading those definitely gave me more faith in the structure, which is what I was looking for really. We'll see how it all turns up. Le Sean fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 1, 2010 23:55
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IJ is my favorite book of all time but I couldn't loving stand the Eschaton poo poo. It was the only section of the book I actually skipped halfway through, which just goes to show you: even die-hard DFW fans don't love everything the guy does.
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Sep 2, 2010 00:20
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Edged Hymn posted:IJ is my favorite book of all time but I couldn't loving stand the Eschaton poo poo. It was the only section of the book I actually skipped halfway through, which just goes to show you: even die-hard DFW fans don't love everything the guy does. Then you missed the good half. As Pemulis gets drunker and more stoned it goes to poo poo and, just go back and read it. You don't have to get the calculus to enjoy that.
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Sep 2, 2010 00:28
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I'm about to start Infinite Jest (once I finish Against The Day, that is) and am very excited. So far, I've read only his non-fiction, and my experience with them has essentially been that, every time I read his writing, I constantly think to myself "This is exactly what I would say...if I were a LOT smarter." A friend of mine really dislikes his work, though, saying that DFW basically just participates in a lot of things that many people genuinely like (lobster festival, state fair, cruise, etc) and comes up with pretentious reasons why they are pedestrian and stupid. Not my perception (or else I wouldn't have kept reading, probably) but I can sort of see where he was coming from with that description.
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Sep 2, 2010 00:59
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:You don't have to get the calculus to enjoy that. As a maths guy, let me be blunt: DFW got it wrong. So, so wrong. It's embarassing to read because he so blatantly doesn't understand what he's writing about, and so insufferably precious he tried that I personally find that section difficult to read. Not saying I hate the guy or anything, but seriously: A lot of his supposed cleverness is related to people who know less about a subject than him assuming that because he sounds confident he must know what his talking about. Pynchon, as mentioned above, is a lot better about that sort of thing.
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Sep 2, 2010 02:07
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Apollodorus posted:A friend of mine really dislikes his work, though, saying that DFW basically just participates in a lot of things that many people genuinely like (lobster festival, state fair, cruise, etc) and comes up with pretentious reasons why they are pedestrian and stupid. Not my perception (or else I wouldn't have kept reading, probably) but I can sort of see where he was coming from with that description.
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Sep 2, 2010 02:11
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I think DFW was a bit love/hate with that sort of stuff. On one hand, he appreciated the whole earnesty and community of the thing; on the other hand, he was a smug overeducated upper-middle class white male and just decidedly not the audience for that kind of thing.
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Sep 2, 2010 02:24
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If you read "A Supposedly Fun Thing" and left with the impression DFW was just looking down his nose at people, you missed something.Le Sean posted:After that first section, things were barren for a while. You have to admit,fancy vocab, describing things mathematically, and crunching thought into daisy-chains running multiple pages is a bit of a slough until you know you can trust what the writer is doing, really sort of see it. This is why, I think, most people recommend reading some non-fiction of his before tackling IJ. If I had to recommend one and only one essay to someone looking to read beforehand, I'd push for them to read "Host", because it's really easy to see that DFW is blatantly withholding information you need to make heads or tails of what's going on until a third of the way through the piece, things like abbreviations or industry speak or who in the hell a given person is. Once you accept that he just likes doing things that way, and yes he does have a plan in mind and yes he will eventually give you all the missing pieces, it's a lot easier to push through the first 300 pages of IJ to the point where things start making sense. Plus "Host" is just cool looking in Consider the Lobster. ArgaWarga fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 03:02
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There is a footnote in Brief Interviews where he describes a failed narrative he just could not get to work and its something along the lines of "...and it involved complex accountant jargon with all the appropriate mathematics to go with it as if one person in a thousand would actually give a poo poo" which speaks both to his pretentiousness and his self-censorship regarding that. It's not that he didn't graduate with a number theory degree, it's that blending that complexity into a workable style while being entertaining and well-crafted is pretty hard to do. I've been reading up on some acedemic papers concerning IJ and, um, while some of the stuff concerning literary theory is really out there, I'm awed at the ability of the book to go deeper and deeper. Also, The Corrections by John Franzen as mentioned above is really freaking good. A restrained DFW, sort of, and while I feel alot of the emotional resonance in DFW's writing comes from the erratic style that just works, Franzen creates a similar despair through controlled, brilliant characterization (and also clever word-play). It would come off as cold if it didn't have an inherent radiance. edit: Latest part that made me lol: a drunken mess of a family man trying to show his family hes not losing his marbles- Wielding his knife clumsily, he filled his mouth with cinders and bloody chicken that he was too tired to chew and swallow and also too tired to get up and spit out. he sat with the unchewed bird flesh in his mouth until he realized that siliva was trickling down his chin-a poor way indeed to demonstrate good mental health. He swallowed the bolus whole. meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 03:05
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:As a maths guy, let me be blunt: DFW got it wrong. So, so wrong. It's embarassing to read because he so blatantly doesn't understand what he's writing about, and so insufferably precious he tried that I personally find that section difficult to read. Can you elaborate? I know his mathematical interest tended more toward the philosophical aspects (and, eg, his book on infinity garnered some light criticism for being less hard-nosedly technical than a text book), but that's a curiously indignant response. Kieselguhr Kid posted:I think DFW was a bit love/hate with that sort of stuff. On one hand, he appreciated the whole earnesty and community of the thing; on the other hand, he was a smug overeducated upper-middle class white male and just decidedly not the audience for that kind of thing.
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Sep 2, 2010 03:20
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WoG posted:Can you elaborate? I know his mathematical interest tended more toward the philosophical aspects (and, eg, his book on infinity garnered some light criticism for being less hard-nosedly technical than a text book), but that's a curiously indignant response. If I remember correctly (and I really don't care to reread the whole section, so I might be a little off), while the explanation of the MVT for integration was essentially correct it didn't make any sense how it was supposed to be applied to the game. For one, it applies only to continuously-defined functions, not a discrete problem like the Eschaton game; secondly, while there does exist a c nestled inbetween [a,b] s.t. f(c)(b-a)=(area bet. a-b), it's not a perscription for how to find c. That's kind of a loose run-thorough and there are some specifics about it but they're really not important. Like, it's not a big deal, and I dug the book, it just really came off as overreaching to impress. You either know the field, in which case it's wrong, or you don't, in which case it's frustrating and confusing. Either way I can't see any reason for it outside of trying to show the audience how smart he is, which only makes it more frustrating that he got it wrong. quote:Well, if the first adjective you associate with him is 'smug', I feel like you're missing one of the most important underlying themes of his work. I think his smugness repulsed him and he tried to work against it. I don't think he always succeeded. Edit: Let me be unambiguous: I like DFW. I own several of his books. I was deeply upset when he killed himself. I think as a writer he had a deeply original voice. I think he wrote amazing prose. I do think, however, that his output was kind of sketchy and immature in a way that makes him more endearing than 'perfect' writers like, I don't know, Updike, or even his friend Frazen. His work is clever and touching and sloppy and pretentious all in concert. It's a kind of energy, and a rare energy. I think we lost something really dear and I would've liked to have seen what he'd written into his fifties, or his sixties, or even later. He's even heavily influenced my own writing. But I do think it's too easy for people to slip into endless unmetered praise for him, especially when it seems to me that his most endearing trait often was occasionally sloppiness, or pretentiousness, or whatever. Kieselguhr Kid fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 03:53
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You're forgetting that the maths is not written from the DFW POV, it's written as Pemulis, who's 17, arrogant, a bit of a poo poo, and thinks he knows more than he actually does. This highlights one of the enjoyable aspects of his writing: the multiple narrative points, from Hal, to Pemulis, to an omniscient narrator and so on, and it's fun to read that playfulness. The dodgy mathematics is analogous to the often misused language in the book, which obviously isn't deployed because DFW "can't write." (c.f.: DFW gets mathematics wrong). Le Sean: The endnote with the filmography was the "hook" for me, if you like. We get a first "unwrapping" of what the novel is about and it's really funny to boot. knees of putty fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 09:51
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WoG posted:Can you elaborate? I know his mathematical interest tended more toward the philosophical aspects (and, eg, his book on infinity garnered some light criticism for being less hard-nosedly technical than a text book), but that's a curiously indignant response. DFW came in for a lot more than "light" criticism when it comes to Everything & More. The reviewer for Science, who admittedly had a bit of a conflict of interest based on his having written a competing book about infinity, claimed that E&M devolves into nonsense less than 100 pages in -- pretty bad for a ~400-page book about math, no? A lengthy article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society covers the controversy around that book fairly even-handedly. (I'll link the index to the issue here to avoid some  ambiguity; check the sidebar for the article, titled "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly about Infinity--A Review of Everything and More.") The review is not something I can condense down to a money quote, but it's worth considering that the reviewer seriously ponders the possibility that the book was meant as a parody of pop-math technical writing. He ultimately rejects that hypothesis (on the basis of DFW's tendency to deal with his readers honestly) and concludes instead that it's merely a pretty lousy book, if intermittently charming.If you're interested in more details, you can find errata for E&M on the appropriate page at The Howling Fantods. Even if everything else were right, the folks who compiled the list still found ~50 errors of greater or lesser importance (the text of the corrections ranging from technical quibbles about diction to "pretty much nonsense" to a whole lot of additional argumentation patching up several consecutive pages of DFW's "proofs"). That said, it's possible he really did mean to make Pemulis's discussion of the mean value theorem imprecise/wrong. But I think it's a pretty serious error to reflexively give him the benefit of the doubt. Unrelated edit: On a complimentary note, I finally got around to reading Girl with Curious Hair recently. I especially enjoyed the title story, which mixed up mirth, dread, on-the-nose political satire, and Hitchock-style silly psychologizing in ways that I'd never imagined possible. "Little Expressionless Animals" shares some of the silly-psych tendencies but more than makes up for it with some interesting riffs about love and vulnerability. "John Billy" and "Everything is Green" both include some weird attempts at "dialect" but make a recovery on the basis of engaging plot and characterization (especially "John Billy," which is like a modern, bloodier-and-filthier gloss on Pecos Bill). "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" seems justly infamous, in retrospect; there's a lot to admire in it, especially the little flash-forward glimpses of the character's lives after the story's "over," the obsessive use and re-use of certain details, the red herrings that are explicitly called out as red herrings, etc. ... But I didn't like it very much. (I should probably read "Lost in the Funhouse" and go back to it.) What are some of you guys' favorites from the collection? Integral Catculus fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Sep 2, 2010 10:25
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Holy poo poo, the personification of calculus is here to clear this up! The problem with assuming the mistake were Pemulis' is that, while that would be enough to excuse any inprecision, it's not enough to justify the fact that it simply makes no sense in the context of the problem. There's just no way it could be applied to the game in any useful way. I really don't see why this is a big deal: DFW hosed up. He didn't know everything. It was sloppy work. There are plenty of other mistakes in the book too, most of which didn't bother me because (a) I'm not that invested in the subject and/or (b) it serves some other purpose beyond just showing off. The whole 'film diskette' conceit was wildly implausible, but it wasn't a big deal because it serves the book beyond just being wank. Incidentally, I picked up a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and was kind of surprised the whole thing didn't consist of, well, y'know. I seriously thought the whole thing was based on the conceit that they were various interviews with 'hideous' people: Narcissists, misanthropes, the terminally awkward, manic depressives, etc. I do not know where I got this idea.
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Sep 2, 2010 10:51
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I agree that one should not necessarily give an auther the benefit of the doubt, but within the context of a fiction, and a complex postmodern piece with a focus on the "meta" aspects of life at that, it seems to sit well with the idea that Pemulis is advanced, but flawed. Really, it doesn't matter whether he got it wrong or not in this work. In the non-fiction work, yes agreed, he should get that right. I would note though that reviewers of mathematical and physics papers are often super-critical, and it doesn't surprise me that an amateur would get some things wrong, and less important, would get some of the jargon incorrect. Jargon is the bane of scientific disciplines, and you often get misunderstandings between departments that just sit next door to each other. He really ought to have got someone to go through and check thoroughly though.
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Sep 2, 2010 10:54
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knees of putty posted:In the non-fiction work, yes agreed, he should get that right. I would note though that reviewers of mathematical and physics papers are often super-critical, and it doesn't surprise me that an amateur would get some things wrong, and less important, would get some of the jargon incorrect. Jargon is the bane of scientific disciplines, and you often get misunderstandings between departments that just sit next door to each other. He really ought to have got someone to go through and check thoroughly though. If you read the Notes review, you'll see that the mathematician in question is a huge fan of DFW's writing; I also inferred that he sincerely wanted the book to be good. And he was neither super-critical nor priggish about jargon. Like you, he even points out (with some regret) that a lot of the imprecision and errors could have been avoided if they'd actually run the book by an expert mathematician. Oh, Kieselguhr Kid: I am not a mathematician, the username notwithstanding, and Wallace probably still knew more real analysis and such than I do. I just happened to know enough about the reception of Everything & More to feel that WoG was soft-pedaling the issue a little bit.
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Sep 2, 2010 11:13
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It took 200 pages for IJ to hook me. That's the section that begins with five pages of terse descriptions of things you'll learn if you hang around the Ennet, or any, recovery house. "That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable." 
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Sep 2, 2010 19:09
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Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts. Paraphrasing: That you'll worry a lot less what other people think about you when you realize how seldom they do. I think it's supposed to be Geoffrey Day's voice, but I forget.
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Sep 2, 2010 19:35
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Integral Catculus posted:DFW came in for a lot more than "light" criticism when it comes to Everything & More. The reviewer for Science, who admittedly had a bit of a conflict of interest based on his having written a competing book about infinity, claimed that E&M devolves into nonsense less than 100 pages in -- pretty bad for a ~400-page book about math, no? I'd like to see that guy tackle Ratner's Star. About DFW's smugness: I always felt he was writing about himself as a character. What happened in, say, on the cruise in A Supposedly Fun Thing... isn't a literal rundown of what happened, it's more of him projecting a stylized version of himself into a story to make it his own. Kind of like what Lester Bangs or Chuck Klosterman do in their features. It's not even all that different then him writing in different character's voices throughout LJ, now that I think about it.
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Sep 2, 2010 22:53
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