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If you thought that was cool, it's gonna rock your world when you read a book whose artistic gambit is all 300k words being joyful and interesting
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Jul 22, 2015 18:17
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Nitevision posted:If you thought that was cool, it's gonna rock your world when you read a book whose artistic gambit is all 300k words being joyful and interesting It may not be exactly what you have in mind but may I recommend A Song of Ice & Fire by George R. R. Martin?
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Jul 22, 2015 19:55
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Look Under The Rock posted:It may not be exactly what you have in mind but may I recommend A Song of Ice & Fire by George R. R. Martin? Oh god. Been reading forums and being a lazy mofo all day but this was my first legitimate laugh. Seven hells, man.
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Jul 22, 2015 20:09
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Look Under The Rock posted:It may not be exactly what you have in mind but may I recommend A Song of Ice & Fire by George R. R. Martin? Have you prepared a cool interpretation of those books in case he dies before finishing
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Jul 23, 2015 00:36
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http://www.reddit.com/user/jeremy1122/comments/?sort=top
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Jul 23, 2015 04:43
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Nitevision posted:Have you prepared a cool interpretation of those books in case he dies before finishing If you read all the books carefully enough it will be clear who rules Westeros of you think about it after you finish the series don't forget the end notes
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Jul 23, 2015 05:04
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please don't doxx me
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Jul 23, 2015 05:24
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I just read Good Old Neon for the first time last night, and my mind is still spinning. I for some reason had never given Oblivion much thought, but now I absolutely have to pick it up. Does anyone know of any particularly interesting analyses out there of Good Old Neon? I was riding the wave until he mentioned David Wallace and then I fell off my board, hit a reef and drowned.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:27
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Oblivion is such a great collection. I'm sure there are some way more in-depth analyses of Good Old Neon out there, but my own take was that making the narrator an acquaintance of "David Wallace" was kind of a solipsistic way to explore himself by proxy; the story deals with basically the biggest fear the Wallace faced (inauthenticity) and the whole thing is basically the narrator realizing some essential truths about himself, but being unable to actually interface with them in any meaningful way because they are always wrapped up in that larger sense of self-doubt, where even the things that are "authentic" are twisted / corrupted by his need to scrutinize them for any trace of something inauthentic. Almost all of the stories in Oblivion (all but one, I think?) are interesting partly because they deal with some larger, looming tragedy that the reader never actually sees. The concept of "oblivion" almost ends up being peaceful by contrast, because the characters are essentially orbiting these traumas that they simultaneously can't understand and can't escape, and the worst part is that they seem to be aware of it.
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Aug 5, 2015 02:02
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I read an in-depth analysis by Marshall Boswell for University. It was called "The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head: Oblivion and The Nightmare of Consciousnes". You'll find it in the 'Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies'. It's been a while, but as far as I can remember, Grizzled Patriarch's analysis is pretty accurate. I am a bit torn by Oblivion. Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer and Mr. Squishy are masterpieces, The Suffering Channel and Oblivion are okay, and the other stories I just don't really understand. sicDaniel fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Aug 5, 2015 |
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Aug 5, 2015 21:02
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I actually really liked The Suffering Channel and Oblivion, though I can see why people wouldn't. The Soul is not a Smithy and Incarnations of Burned Children were really good, too. I think Oblivion is a stronger collection overall than Girl With Curious Hair, although the latter has Little Expressionless Animals - which is, imo, the best short story he ever wrote - and My Appearance, which really stuck with me. Oblivion is a lot denser and darker, though, so people that are really drawn to Wallace's humor generally feel it is lacking something.
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Aug 5, 2015 21:10
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I really have to read Girl with Curious Hair. Can you believe it, I've read Infinite Jest twice but still don't own a copy of GWCH. Or The Pale King. I guess I'm taking it slow, knowing that there won't be any new material by the Davester, ever.
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Aug 5, 2015 21:44
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sicDaniel posted:I really have to read Girl with Curious Hair. Can you believe it, I've read Infinite Jest twice but still don't own a copy of GWCH. Or The Pale King. I guess I'm taking it slow, knowing that there won't be any new material by the Davester, ever. I've intentionally stayed away from The Pale King. For me, the whole experience is ruined knowing that he didn't get to finish the book.
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Aug 6, 2015 19:53
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Schwack posted:I've intentionally stayed away from The Pale King. For me, the whole experience is ruined knowing that he didn't get to finish the book. You should give it a chance. It's incomplete, but it is not a first draft by any means. There are some really wonderful, complete sections.
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Aug 6, 2015 20:14
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The end notes are also fascinating. I didn't realize they were present until I'd come about halfway through, and they really illuminate a lot of the chapters and goings on.
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Aug 6, 2015 20:49
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blue squares posted:You should give it a chance. It's incomplete, but it is not a first draft by any means. There are some really wonderful, complete sections. Agreed. It's like reading a random half of Infinite Jest: still way better than anything else on your bookshelf. It's definitely enough to see where he was going with it, and how it fits thematically into his oeuvre. Totally worthwhile. I completely get the urge to disdain it as unfinished, but it deserves your time. Many of the chapters would have made it to publication with only very minor edits. Damnit Dave, we miss you. 
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Aug 7, 2015 04:56
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Hey, did anybody get a chance to see this movie? Overall nothing really offensive about it to me, but it was impossible for me to sink into it and enjoy it as a movie because I couldn't help but note everything that was off or wrong about it. That's pretty much all I'm going to do in this post because I can't account for much more about it. (I hope it comes across that these are more observations than complaints. My overall feeling about the movie might be called a little better than indifferent.) So for instance, because the interview transcript it's based on is pretty wholly undramatic, the screenwriter took parts of the interview where Lipsky asks Wallace uncomfortable questions (about drug use, about perhaps putting on a faux-naïve act), parts that were merely a little awkward, and turned them into "conflict scenes" that cause Lipsky and Wallace to have little fallings-out. To give you an idea, there's a silent elevator ride. Part of what the movie does structurally is turn the answer to the Heroin Question into a quest for Lipsky. In the book it comes halfway through and it's simply (paraphrasing) "Were you a heroin addict? Sorry, I gotta ask again. Lots of addiction stuff in the book." "This again? No, never was." In the movie, this scene is turned into a dramatic climax with an exasperated Wallace yelling at Lipsky in his living room (rather than, I think, a diner). After the showdown about heroin in his living room is the second climax in which Wallace stops into Lipsky's room in the middle of the night and (for the dramatic purposes of the movie) finally opens up about his experience with depression and being in the hospital. In the book this is just something Wallace says to Lipsky while they're driving around. In the movie, it's the moment of revelation and the demonstration of friendship and trust. Basically, the filmmakers repeatedly turn up the Drama Dial for scenes that in the book were just a bit awkward. There's also a whole odd chunk of the movie where Lipsky and Wallace meet two women, old friends of Wallace's, and Wallace gets pissed at Lipsky for flirting with one of them. I don't think this would be greatly out of character for Wallace since he was competitive and sensitive, prone to jealousy of all kinds. But I have no idea where these women and the scenes with them come from. If they're in the transcript, they're a line of text. Maybe it really happened and Lipsky cut it from the book. If it's all made up, it, combined with all the lines Wallace didn't really say peppered throughout plus the rearrangement and intensification of the material, really makes this more like historical fiction than historical reconstruction. Segel's performance? Too shy. Hypersensitive. Arms always crossed. He sounds like Wallace to me, but he always sounds like Wallace on the NPR tapes Segel probably studied. Eisenberg sounds like he's having a conversation with a person corporeally in front of him, and Segel sounds like he's talking softly into a radio microphone. If you listen to samples of Lipsky's tapes that were put online, or Wallace at readings or in interviews on a stage, then you hear that he reserved his ultra-shy voice mainly for radio shows, and that was really only until a question really engaged him. Essentially, the interview is an interview and the movie is a movie. Since I know so much about Wallace the person, it's impossible for me to tell whether this movie is any good or not just as a movie, the way it was easy for me to tell that the Bobby Fischer trailer that played before it was awesome. No disbelief-suspension problems there because I know vanishingly little about Fischer. But as someone who's interested in Wallace and his books, pretty much all I know is that it's not useful to me. And it was seemingly impossible for me to forget all that and just have a pure aesthetic experience with what was on the screen, as I'm sure many other people in the theater with me were having. Sir John Feelgood fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Aug 25, 2015 |
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Aug 25, 2015 01:10
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I saw it last weekend. I really liked Segel's Wallace, he had a few of the mannerisms down pat and his accent was better than I thought it would be. I didn't like Eisenberg. He spent the whole movie looking like he was going to cry or was expecting to be punched. The movie was weird, I agree about the manufactured drama, and the tonal shift from book to movie was really jarring -- in the book, Lipsky has all those italicized asides about how he felt Wallace was putting on a facade, and in the movie he comes off as a jerk because he openly calls out that behavior and Wallace maintains that there's no faux thing going on. There's also some strange anachronistic product labels that took me out of it, but I guess it might be too much to ask that they actually use the 90s Taco Bell sign and maybe not show LED billboards. I dunno, that bugged me. It didn't feel like the mid nineties. I will confess to shedding tears at the ending. It was a really lovely image to close with.
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Aug 25, 2015 17:55
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Saw it last night; it seemed like they made Wallace more prone to anger and Lipsky less insightful, which just made me like both characters less. The book was full of little moments where Lipsky said something Wallace hadn't thought of that way before, and Wallace would be quietly delighted by it. The movie has maybe one or two, and spends the rest of the time giving Wallace a sense of quietly explosive menace, which seemed out of place. They're angry at each other more than they're friendly, which sours the whole concept that they developed the sort of close-but-temporary friendship the movie is supposed to be about. So basically it wasn't awful, and it had some very good moments, but I liked the book a lot better, which is exactly the sort of banal insight you might expect yourself to have about a DFW movie.
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Aug 28, 2015 13:24
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Holy poo poo this is an excellent find
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Sep 1, 2015 04:03
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Here's a new interview with DT Max, at one point he sounds tired of talking DFW, but there may be some insights, the interviewer hasn't read IJ, fyi. http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/32373
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Oct 13, 2015 14:47
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New Infinite Jest cover for the 20th anniversary edition. Fan designed. Thoughts? I hate it. There's nothing minimalist about the book, so why should the cover be minimalist? It should be a crazy cover with tons of stuff packed onto it. blue squares fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 01:04
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Yeah. I'd prefer a technical schematic of JOI's infant wobblevision camera over something that makes it look like 1984 for kidz
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Dec 26, 2015 01:07
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Blegh
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Dec 26, 2015 01:22
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maybe the new foreword won't blow as much as Dave Eggers'?
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Dec 26, 2015 01:51
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I've seen a ton of fan designed IJ covers on the internet and cannot remember one that looked that bad. Very true, it doesn't fit the novel at all, in style or in content.
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Dec 26, 2015 10:20
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Is there a specific meaning to the 'blue sky w/clouds' motif of the existing IJ covers? Am I missing something very obvious?
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Dec 26, 2015 11:36
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Slate Action posted:Is there a specific meaning to the 'blue sky w/clouds' motif of the existing IJ covers? Am I missing something very obvious? I believe that it's a painting in someone's office at the ETA, but I can't recall whose office wall it's on.
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Dec 26, 2015 12:50
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A bland uninteresting and frankly bad cover seems quite appropriate to me?
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Dec 26, 2015 14:41
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Rusty Staub posted:maybe the new foreword won't blow as much as Dave Eggers'? That foreword is the best thing about the book.
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Dec 26, 2015 14:42
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CestMoi posted:That foreword is the best thing about the book.
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Dec 26, 2015 15:46
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Malefic Marmite posted:I believe that it's a painting in someone's office at the ETA, but I can't recall whose office wall it's on. It's wallpaper and it's in the office of JOI as "professional conversationalist" iirc Wallace didn't like the original cover but this one is just so bad. I despise that font. It looks like a Malcolm Gladwell book.
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Dec 26, 2015 17:29
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Look Under The Rock posted:It's wallpaper and it's in the office of JOI as "professional conversationalist" iirc Yeah but the cover DFW suggested (giant postmodern sculpture made out of industrial machinery) sounded really bad too. Frankly I don't care what they do until and unless they add some ancillary material from his notes, maybe some cut text, etc. But of course I'll buy it anyway. My first-run paperback is getting worn and the pages are yellowing.
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Dec 26, 2015 17:59
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IIRC, he wanted the cover to be a production shot from Metropolis, with Fritz Lang calling everyone together with a big megaphone. When I'm not on my phone, I'll dig up the pic. He mentions it in Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. edit: Here's the pic:  Which I guess would have worked for the Himself parts of the book, and all the parts about submitting control of yourself to a higher power, but 
Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 18:52
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Toph Bei Fong posted:IIRC, he wanted the cover to be a production shot from Metropolis, with Fritz Lang calling everyone together with a big megaphone. When I'm not on my phone, I'll dig up the pic. He mentions it in Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Would have worked much better. But I really think the clouds & sky cover somehow captured the gestalt of the novel effectively, though I'm not sure I could explain why. Maybe it's what I imagine to be running through the minds of the Entertainment's victims? Never considered that before.
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Dec 26, 2015 18:58
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Infinite Jest for Kindle is $2.99 on Amazon today. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000S1M9LY/
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Dec 28, 2015 14:44
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Holy poo poo, look at this incredible fan-designed cover that I want to buy and put on the new hardcover instead.   Source: http://www.themadeshop.com/192807/7641998/work/infinite-jest-20th-anniversary-cover-design
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Dec 28, 2015 18:05
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clown shoes posted:Infinite Jest for Kindle is $2.99 on Amazon today. Dang actually 5 of DFW's books on sale today: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse/ref=pe_170810_161090180_pe_button/?ie=UTF8&node=7788141011 I have all of these in physical form but might buy Pale King to reread on my Kindle.
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Dec 28, 2015 19:49
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blue squares posted:Holy poo poo, look at this incredible fan-designed cover that I want to buy and put on the new hardcover instead. drat, that is a good cover
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Dec 30, 2015 15:19
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Didn't Dave Eggers originally dislike the novel but he changed his tune 9 years later so he could fit in, expand his brand and market, and seem smart and cool? Lol. Such a hack. IJ cover: I swear I read somewhere that DFW originally wanted the cover to be that B&W photo from the 40s or 50s of a crowd of suits sitting in a theater in 3D glasses, looking up at an out-of-frame screen.
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Jan 12, 2016 22:53
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