What do you think?
Rate this book
Both Flesh and Not: Essays
Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ): Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.
Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem ; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.
Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.
Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem ; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.
Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 2012
539 people are currently reading
8489 people want to read
About the author
David Foster Wallace
130 books13.1k followersDavid Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. He earned degrees in English and philosophy from Amherst College, then completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. His early academic work in logic and philosophy informed much of his writing, particularly in his blending of analytical depth with emotional complexity.
Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), established his reputation as a fresh literary talent. Over the next two decades, he published widely in prestigious journals and magazines, producing short stories, essays, and book reviews that earned him critical acclaim. His work was characterized by linguistic virtuosity, inventive structure, and a deep concern for moral and existential questions. In addition to fiction, he tackled topics ranging from tennis and state fairs to cruise ships, politics, and the ethics of food consumption.
Beyond his literary achievements, Wallace had a significant academic career, teaching literature and writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was known for his intense engagement with students and commitment to teaching.
Wallace struggled with depression and addiction for much of his adult life, and he was hospitalized multiple times. He died by suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. In the years since his death, his influence has continued to grow, inspiring scholars, conferences, and a dedicated readership. However, his legacy is complicated by posthumous revelations of abusive behavior, particularly during his relationship with writer Mary Karr, which has led to ongoing debate within literary and academic communities.
His distinctive voice—by turns cerebral, comic, and compassionate—remains a defining force in contemporary literature. Wallace once described fiction as a way of making readers feel "less alone inside," and it is that emotional resonance, alongside his formal daring, that continues to define his place in American letters.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 681 reviews
January 7, 2020
Another collection of essays that reminded me of After Henry by Joan Didion which I recently read as well. This collection of essays was also really well written yet I found some of it boring, especially the two on tennis. I honestly hate watching sports except maybe soccer and regardless of that eloquent essay about the beauty of the human body and tennis or the commercialization at the US open I still had to drag myself through those two. I however did enjoy the essays about writing much more, especially the one where he talks about fun and writing. The comparison of ones own work to a deformed baby was funny, at least to me which probably doesn't say anything good about me. The essay on the problems and changes in writing because of cultural changes was interesting, though I'm not sure how much I agree with the often said sentiment that our attention spans are getting shorter, which tends to grate on my nerves. The essay about a book and it's metaphysical message conveyed through writing was interesting but I havent read that book so I was halfheartedly reading it. I also don't think I agree very much with the messages in the essay on AIDS or Math, even though the writing in the AIDS essay amused me greatly. I guess my point is I don't agree with a lot of what's expressed in the book and some of the essays weren't as interesting to me but I enjoyed the writing enough to give it four stars.
Also side note is this kind of thing common with journalists where they publish books of their essays, because I'm not sure I get what the purpose it besides to show off their superior writing. Not that theres anything wrong with that its just a lot of the essays from both Wallace and Didion's collections seem to be from the 1980's and somewhat onward to early 2000's and so they're seem slightly irrelevant.
Also side note is this kind of thing common with journalists where they publish books of their essays, because I'm not sure I get what the purpose it besides to show off their superior writing. Not that theres anything wrong with that its just a lot of the essays from both Wallace and Didion's collections seem to be from the 1980's and somewhat onward to early 2000's and so they're seem slightly irrelevant.
August 11, 2024
I have a confession. Although of course* I didn’t want (or expect) to dislike this book, at all, I did want to be able to say something that proves I could be brusque with/critical of DFW just as easily as I could gush over/laud him. I wanted to be able to establish my Howling fandom by accentuating my knowledge of his prior collections, and concluding that this one doesn’t quite stack up. But alas, I cannot. Foster Wallace is as sublime as ever (realizing that these essays span many years of his career, and have been accessible in uncollected form for some time), bordering on the awesome. Foster Wallace characteristically provoked many breath-catching, head-shaking moments for this reader with his ability to essentially speak, in an almost vicarious form, for you (well, me at least), but better.
Nobody needs me to recommend DFW to them—he’s always well-recommended himself—so I am going to provide selected explanations of and thoughts on selected essays of the collection:
In Federer Both Flesh and Not, our correspondent makes frequent pleas for us to attend a live professional tennis match so that we may witness the beauty and power that television is incapable of exhibiting. And you know what? I am mostly convinced that it would be rewarding to oblige. Well done again, for inciting some interest in tennis, in which, like many of his readers, I was not previously much interested. He was not faking his love for the game.
Both Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young and The Empty Plenum were, with guillotine-like force, jaw-dropping in their articulation and insight. The former is an inspection of the young writers of contemporary fiction (beginning in the 1980’s), and a literary generational gap, and I suspect it is argued (actually I’ve heard it said), that subsequent literary generations have only gotten worse. This is quite contentious, obviously, because it rips a chasm in the old chestnut of what constitutes art. It lacks tendentiousness, but not sympathy. It may also explain, in part, Bret Easton Ellis’s dismay over the posthumous encomium of Foster Wallace, whose work (BEE’s, that is, which I also love, for what it’s worth) even if not mentioned by name in the essay, could have been ascertained by the invented term Neiman-Marcus Nihilism.
The latter is the highly praised philosophical exposition of (/introduction to?) David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. But the ways that loneliness and solipsism are dealt with are nothing short of utterly piercing. Whether it’s in pointing out the error of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, (because ever since reading him, I never felt he had valid ripostes to his own purported impasses), or the plight of Kate in WM in writing, not speaking, the content of the novel. There is no one to speak to, and perhaps no one else to speak of. Anyway, reading these two, I felt like a slack-jawed yokel being introduced to electricity, to the literal degree that I was babbling incoherently about how incredible they was.
To demonstrate that I know the definition of literal, I will share excerpts from a conversation I had with a friend right after finishing Fictional Futures (omitting my second party’s inputs):
By a wide margin, the best parts of Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open, another tennis one, were the footnoted complaints about the concession stands, and a brief, somewhat sad, yet wholly hilarious, exchange with a woman who, like him, wanted relief from the crowd.
Back in New Fire explores sexuality in a reserved, but by no means puritanical, and in a particularly serious, yet paradoxically hilarious way, in light of the AIDS outbreak. In it, he administers a wonderful and convincing metaphor for sexuality in a knight battling a dragon to rescue the princess and commence coitus. He also delivers one of the most painfully true statements ever documented w/r/t naturally occurring diseases, specifically AIDS: “Nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are; the only good and bad things are people’s various choices in the face of what is. But our own history shows that—for whatever reasons—an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion, prices for choices.” Okay, I could get into why we would even need to think in terms of reasons. I could also take issue him applying the word choices and get into the vexing subject of free will, but those would be digressions for the sake of this statement, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Appropriately labeled F/X Porn and the Inverse Cost and Quality Law which states “very simply that the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be” perfectly sums up what has seemed to have happened to Hollywood. A strange subject to be known as prophetic on, but god damn, he nailed it in The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2.
The Nature of the Fun is on the necessity of writing. This is the specific one I referred to, in which he is uncannily able to translate the thoughts of, presumably, many writers (and indeed many aspiring writers) to tremendous effect. I’m not suggesting that it is necessarily universal, but the plight of a writer seems to be both a shared and mutually understood burden, as well as an unconditional adoration, the likes of which cannot be lived without. And, for what it’s worth, I agree that Don DeLillo’s hideously damaged infant metaphor is probably the finest that someone could come up with, because even if one’s project is irreversibly doomed (terminally ill), and will never make it to publication (adulthood), it is a component of who one is. I feel a strong urge to endlessly clamor on about how apt this essay was, but I’ll save it for a drunken conversation (with any and all of you folks).
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama is a very funny piece on a class of genre fiction that I really didn’t even know existed. He tells us to call it “Geek Chic” or “Hip(2b)2”. While reading, I had no choice but to agree whenever our correspondent opined that he couldn’t figure out the target audience for this type of math fiction, because those who would be able to understand its esoteric content, would undoubtedly realize the errors and pulled-from-their-ass algorithms and, um, calibrator sets? And those who aren’t part of the mathematics elite wouldn’t pick the book up in the first place. But I may have to read one of these novels now if only to use this essay as a companion piece.
Written in bulleted notes, The Best of the Prose Poem expresses my anxiety and confusion to a T of what prose poetry actually is, and according to whom, and what its distinguishing features are from flash fiction, & etc. What do I write that I have the right to deem poetry? Was what I just wrote a poem? Why not?
Twenty-Four Word Notes helped me with grammar more than all of my accumulated English education through high school. That is not hyperbolic. This made me want to return to everything I have ever written and fix them in all the ways he discusses, albeit I am sure that I have perniciously blundered much of this review itself, by his standards. I want more of these notes, and I want to commit them to memory.
DFW has written on Kafka. He’s written on Lynch. He now tackles Borges; well, more accurately, the biography of Borges by Edwin Williamson, which I own, but also have not read yet. This essay, titled Borges on the Couch has not dissuaded me from reading Borges: A Life, but has given me reason to take many of Williamson’s claims with a grain of salt, particularly w/r/t the psychological aspects and conclusions that are drawn from Borges’ fiction. I think DFW here points out what is inherently problematic about biographies (which causes even more skepticism about his own biography by D.T. Max), which is that “…interpretations (of respective writers’ work) amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism.” It is indeed alarming to consider someone who didn’t know you relaying your life to the masses after your death with their own interpretations of what you’ve done.
Ladies and gentlemen, I close by saying (a la, or credit to, Christopher Hitchens, for dramatic opening line of closing statement) something combative (perhaps unnecessary and irrelevant as well [which I may regret if any fussy European exclusivists or counter-counter-culturalists happen upon my word-type-things]). Anyone who claims that DFW was somehow unintelligent, or was blowing smoke, or was disingenuous, is a fink, and probably rather disingenuous themselves. Not everyone has to enjoy him, or even think he’s worth much in the literary canon, but the observational evidence does not coincide with such strident allegations as stated supra.
David Foster Wallace, we still love you old boy.
*This serves both as an obligatory homage to DFW’s use of language and his trademark footnotes.
Nobody needs me to recommend DFW to them—he’s always well-recommended himself—so I am going to provide selected explanations of and thoughts on selected essays of the collection:
In Federer Both Flesh and Not, our correspondent makes frequent pleas for us to attend a live professional tennis match so that we may witness the beauty and power that television is incapable of exhibiting. And you know what? I am mostly convinced that it would be rewarding to oblige. Well done again, for inciting some interest in tennis, in which, like many of his readers, I was not previously much interested. He was not faking his love for the game.
Both Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young and The Empty Plenum were, with guillotine-like force, jaw-dropping in their articulation and insight. The former is an inspection of the young writers of contemporary fiction (beginning in the 1980’s), and a literary generational gap, and I suspect it is argued (actually I’ve heard it said), that subsequent literary generations have only gotten worse. This is quite contentious, obviously, because it rips a chasm in the old chestnut of what constitutes art. It lacks tendentiousness, but not sympathy. It may also explain, in part, Bret Easton Ellis’s dismay over the posthumous encomium of Foster Wallace, whose work (BEE’s, that is, which I also love, for what it’s worth) even if not mentioned by name in the essay, could have been ascertained by the invented term Neiman-Marcus Nihilism.
The latter is the highly praised philosophical exposition of (/introduction to?) David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. But the ways that loneliness and solipsism are dealt with are nothing short of utterly piercing. Whether it’s in pointing out the error of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, (because ever since reading him, I never felt he had valid ripostes to his own purported impasses), or the plight of Kate in WM in writing, not speaking, the content of the novel. There is no one to speak to, and perhaps no one else to speak of. Anyway, reading these two, I felt like a slack-jawed yokel being introduced to electricity, to the literal degree that I was babbling incoherently about how incredible they was.
To demonstrate that I know the definition of literal, I will share excerpts from a conversation I had with a friend right after finishing Fictional Futures (omitting my second party’s inputs):
I can't believe DFW wrote like that in 1987...Or had those ideas…I feel pathetic that it was mostly revelatory to me, or at least the way he articulated it… The entire essay…Sorry, I just...Ellis is just one example he used in discussing the whole subject of Conspicuously Young writers of that era, and literary criticism thereafter…He was only (about) 30(?) when he wrote that essay, which I find peculiar somehow… I thought it was really good, but I may be naive and even ignorant about what has transpired in the literary world since then, but also the fact that he felt comfortable speaking that way of his own generation of writers… Parts of it, perhaps… I feel cold right now, like I don't understand literature, but there were those hints he put in as if to say 'fuck it all'...I don't know…You'll have to read it… I may need to talk about it some more…I can't do anything but babble right now…I can't be coherent, hahahahaha.(What I meant to say was, ‘I can’t speak coherently’).
By a wide margin, the best parts of Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open, another tennis one, were the footnoted complaints about the concession stands, and a brief, somewhat sad, yet wholly hilarious, exchange with a woman who, like him, wanted relief from the crowd.
Back in New Fire explores sexuality in a reserved, but by no means puritanical, and in a particularly serious, yet paradoxically hilarious way, in light of the AIDS outbreak. In it, he administers a wonderful and convincing metaphor for sexuality in a knight battling a dragon to rescue the princess and commence coitus. He also delivers one of the most painfully true statements ever documented w/r/t naturally occurring diseases, specifically AIDS: “Nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are; the only good and bad things are people’s various choices in the face of what is. But our own history shows that—for whatever reasons—an erotically charged human existence requires impediments to passion, prices for choices.” Okay, I could get into why we would even need to think in terms of reasons. I could also take issue him applying the word choices and get into the vexing subject of free will, but those would be digressions for the sake of this statement, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Appropriately labeled F/X Porn and the Inverse Cost and Quality Law which states “very simply that the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be” perfectly sums up what has seemed to have happened to Hollywood. A strange subject to be known as prophetic on, but god damn, he nailed it in The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2.
The Nature of the Fun is on the necessity of writing. This is the specific one I referred to, in which he is uncannily able to translate the thoughts of, presumably, many writers (and indeed many aspiring writers) to tremendous effect. I’m not suggesting that it is necessarily universal, but the plight of a writer seems to be both a shared and mutually understood burden, as well as an unconditional adoration, the likes of which cannot be lived without. And, for what it’s worth, I agree that Don DeLillo’s hideously damaged infant metaphor is probably the finest that someone could come up with, because even if one’s project is irreversibly doomed (terminally ill), and will never make it to publication (adulthood), it is a component of who one is. I feel a strong urge to endlessly clamor on about how apt this essay was, but I’ll save it for a drunken conversation (with any and all of you folks).
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama is a very funny piece on a class of genre fiction that I really didn’t even know existed. He tells us to call it “Geek Chic” or “Hip(2b)2”. While reading, I had no choice but to agree whenever our correspondent opined that he couldn’t figure out the target audience for this type of math fiction, because those who would be able to understand its esoteric content, would undoubtedly realize the errors and pulled-from-their-ass algorithms and, um, calibrator sets? And those who aren’t part of the mathematics elite wouldn’t pick the book up in the first place. But I may have to read one of these novels now if only to use this essay as a companion piece.
Written in bulleted notes, The Best of the Prose Poem expresses my anxiety and confusion to a T of what prose poetry actually is, and according to whom, and what its distinguishing features are from flash fiction, & etc. What do I write that I have the right to deem poetry? Was what I just wrote a poem? Why not?
Twenty-Four Word Notes helped me with grammar more than all of my accumulated English education through high school. That is not hyperbolic. This made me want to return to everything I have ever written and fix them in all the ways he discusses, albeit I am sure that I have perniciously blundered much of this review itself, by his standards. I want more of these notes, and I want to commit them to memory.
DFW has written on Kafka. He’s written on Lynch. He now tackles Borges; well, more accurately, the biography of Borges by Edwin Williamson, which I own, but also have not read yet. This essay, titled Borges on the Couch has not dissuaded me from reading Borges: A Life, but has given me reason to take many of Williamson’s claims with a grain of salt, particularly w/r/t the psychological aspects and conclusions that are drawn from Borges’ fiction. I think DFW here points out what is inherently problematic about biographies (which causes even more skepticism about his own biography by D.T. Max), which is that “…interpretations (of respective writers’ work) amount to a simplistic, dishonest kind of psychological criticism.” It is indeed alarming to consider someone who didn’t know you relaying your life to the masses after your death with their own interpretations of what you’ve done.
Ladies and gentlemen, I close by saying (a la, or credit to, Christopher Hitchens, for dramatic opening line of closing statement) something combative (perhaps unnecessary and irrelevant as well [which I may regret if any fussy European exclusivists or counter-counter-culturalists happen upon my word-type-things]). Anyone who claims that DFW was somehow unintelligent, or was blowing smoke, or was disingenuous, is a fink, and probably rather disingenuous themselves. Not everyone has to enjoy him, or even think he’s worth much in the literary canon, but the observational evidence does not coincide with such strident allegations as stated supra.
David Foster Wallace, we still love you old boy.
*This serves both as an obligatory homage to DFW’s use of language and his trademark footnotes.
November 14, 2025
While I have no empirical data to support this claim, I think it’s safe to say that only David Foster Wallace could write essays on tennis which do not cause the slippery migration of my eyelids over their respective corneas in soporific nuru massage (i.e pulling down the foreskin of my peepers as if stretched by palpebral lodestones and observing my consciousness as it disrupts the surface tension of half-sleep like a blazing meteor walloping a tranquil pond of thick, tapioca pudding, its violence quickly arrested and transformed into a spectacle of transverse-custard-waves, the tidal tantrums of senescence quickly dissipating as the intruder sinks inexorably into benthic realms of milk, sugar, thickening agents, and quiescence) I knew nothing about tennis. I knew nothing about Federer or Nadal. About the importance of topspin in tennis, (having, at the time of this essay, reached its apogee in the proprioceptive majesty of Mr. Federer), or just how hellaciously fast those pressurized shells of rubber are whizzing across the court. (For example; really internalizing exactly how I’d react if one of them struck my left tit at 235 km/h, captured in slow motion, transverse (i.e oscillations perpendicular to the direction of the wave's advance)-breast-waves propagating radially from the nexus of my (I would have to imagine; hard - like an aspirin on an ironing board) nipple in hypnotic fashion, as my blank expression gives way to a distorted grimace moments after this surgical mule-kick has transmitted its kinetic energy into my (now screaming) milk secreting organ, (and deformed & vibrating dermal tissues have passed on the message to my central nervous system that; “Minnie (the right being Mickey) has been the recipient of a blistering impact.” And my brain has transduced these signals into an electrochemical ballet of; “Warning; High velocity Slazenger has demapped Mickey’s sweetheart.”) and ricocheted to explode the Honey Orange Creamsicle Slushie in my opposing hand, causing me to spin and centripetally relinquish my giant pretzel in a vector tangential to my breast clutching agony so that it spirals into the packed Wimbledon crowd and is never seen again.) Due in part to better conditioned athletes, but also advances in racket technology.
Let me bestow another bizarre accolade on the author; there are few people who I would continue to love after they’ve lambasted Terminator 2 as being on the level of hardcore pornography, (although, perhaps on deeper reflection, my relationship to the franchise solicits further integration of the fact that challenges to my probity are well deserved) and yet here I am, in continued infatuation, not prepared to disavow the man for slandering a movie that made me cry so much I had to strangle my dad until he assured me that the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 being lowered into molten steel with his thumb stoically erect, was not, in fact, the last gesture of the heroic cyborg, but merely the high water mark for a series which would quickly make me wish it had been.
To be as transparent as possible about my feelings on DFW: I had an eschatological dream once in which, 99942 Apophis (i.e, an asteroid with a diameter of 370 metres (1,210 feet) that has been relegated to a non-threat on the Torino Impact Hazard scale, but intruded upon my dreams due to its badass name) was certain to plow earth right in its molten bollox within a few days. Upon learning this, my first impulses were to 1.) Fornicate with as many beautiful women as possible. 2.) Tell my friends I love them. 3.) Re-read Infinite Jest.
What I’m trying to indicate here in my agitated way is that David Foster Wallace could’ve written observations about anything and I would’ve been happy to read it, even if it were an eclectic collection that happened to lack thematic cohesion (as this one does) about things I have limited or no interest in (topics which this collection frequently evinces). Because his way of looking at the world was truly unique, not in the trite sense in which everyone’s is, but unique and nourishing in a way that his readership (and the world) is deeply impoverished for having lost. Maybe that exposes me as a Pygmalion fangirl who is just looking to posthumously collect enough bits and bobs to reconstruct a simulacrum of the man’s brain that I can have a meaningful sapiosexual relationship with. Maybe I’m hoping that Aphrodite, moved by my strange, yet undeniably powerful amorous impulse, will bestow the simulation with some spark of life so I can have just one precious conversation.
Should deific beneficence fail to materialize, I hope I’ve imagination enough for him to continue to live and breathe inside the flux of my addled being, as I continue to use bits of prearranged meaning I’ve taken from his work to anchor me against the total dissolution that so many (including the author) fall victim to.
Let me bestow another bizarre accolade on the author; there are few people who I would continue to love after they’ve lambasted Terminator 2 as being on the level of hardcore pornography, (although, perhaps on deeper reflection, my relationship to the franchise solicits further integration of the fact that challenges to my probity are well deserved) and yet here I am, in continued infatuation, not prepared to disavow the man for slandering a movie that made me cry so much I had to strangle my dad until he assured me that the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 being lowered into molten steel with his thumb stoically erect, was not, in fact, the last gesture of the heroic cyborg, but merely the high water mark for a series which would quickly make me wish it had been.
To be as transparent as possible about my feelings on DFW: I had an eschatological dream once in which, 99942 Apophis (i.e, an asteroid with a diameter of 370 metres (1,210 feet) that has been relegated to a non-threat on the Torino Impact Hazard scale, but intruded upon my dreams due to its badass name) was certain to plow earth right in its molten bollox within a few days. Upon learning this, my first impulses were to 1.) Fornicate with as many beautiful women as possible. 2.) Tell my friends I love them. 3.) Re-read Infinite Jest.
What I’m trying to indicate here in my agitated way is that David Foster Wallace could’ve written observations about anything and I would’ve been happy to read it, even if it were an eclectic collection that happened to lack thematic cohesion (as this one does) about things I have limited or no interest in (topics which this collection frequently evinces). Because his way of looking at the world was truly unique, not in the trite sense in which everyone’s is, but unique and nourishing in a way that his readership (and the world) is deeply impoverished for having lost. Maybe that exposes me as a Pygmalion fangirl who is just looking to posthumously collect enough bits and bobs to reconstruct a simulacrum of the man’s brain that I can have a meaningful sapiosexual relationship with. Maybe I’m hoping that Aphrodite, moved by my strange, yet undeniably powerful amorous impulse, will bestow the simulation with some spark of life so I can have just one precious conversation.
Should deific beneficence fail to materialize, I hope I’ve imagination enough for him to continue to live and breathe inside the flux of my addled being, as I continue to use bits of prearranged meaning I’ve taken from his work to anchor me against the total dissolution that so many (including the author) fall victim to.
![Profile Image for s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1735525095i%2F6431467._UX200_CR0%2C11%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
November 24, 2012
Consider the B-sides
As often with posthumous collections, Both Flesh and Not suffers slightly from the fact that these essays were bound together for the simple reason of producing another book to fill the shelves and minds of DFW’s perfervid fans and readers. It was only fitting to release another collection of essays riding on the heels of D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, and with his other posthumous work, The Pale King, having been nominated for the Pulitzer. While all of these essays are available elsewhere, and do seem a bit thrown together in an all-too-short collection, having a new Wallace book in my hands is a reason to celebrate. The essays are full of his charm, with his biting wit and humor that is sure to make anyone laugh, and the great, impassioned rants he composes for palm-in-the-face blunders such as Williamson’s Borges biography. Despite being slightly disappointing compared to, say, Consider the Lobster, this is a great collection that is sure to satisfy anyone else jonesing for more DFW.
This collection is signature DFW. Starting off on his Federer essay, it is always a pleasure to feel Wallace’s excitement and pure joy for tennis flowing off the page. It was also enjoyable as I too am a fan of Roger Federer and could share in his passion for expressing how cool it is to witness amazing Federer moments. Through all these essays, you feel more as if Wallace is communicating with you instead of merely lecturing at you, which is a large part of why I really enjoy his writing. It always feels like his major purpose aside from informing is to get you as equally excited about the subject as he is. Such as in essays like 24 Word Notes, which is a great companion piece to his Authority and American Usage in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, DFW has the ability to make studying grammar seem like some sort of rock star lifestyle. He makes grammar cool, exciting, and enjoyable (he also makes me painfully aware I need to work on my own grammar). He also has an amazing ability to give what seems like a fair, even assessment of his topics, such as his essay on the ‘Conspicuously Young’ writers, the literary Brat Pack, where he both defends them while pointing out the criticisms that are ‘mean, but unfortunately fair’. This essay is one to surely not miss.
Humor is a big draw to DFW, and his way of insulting a topic in such a way that you can’t help but rolling on the floor laughing as you nod your head in agreement. He has a gift for tearing things apart with his wit, such as in the essay on Terminator 2 (which, in turn, is an essay widely praising Cameron’s early work in Aliens and the first Terminator):
The major issue with this collection is that it simply takes essays from all over his career and tosses them together. Many are rather short, a few being only 2-3 pages (although I loved to read his thoughts on Zbigniew Herbert ), and many seem to work more as a companion to essays in earlier collections. It is a great book for a fan who has already explored much of his work, granted they had not already read most of these online, but I would advise new readers to come back for this one later. It was slightly disappointing is well that the best essay in the collection is one I had already read when I first experienced Markson’s wonderful Wittgenstein’s Mistress. In a later essay, Wallace says of WM ‘that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country’. That, coming from Wallace, is high praise.
Despite the shortcomings, this was still an enjoyable read. It always breaks my heart to think of Wallace and his tragic end, especially as much of his work deals with loneliness. There are many times I wish I could have given him an enormous hug and said ‘I love you man, please don’t leave us’. While he may no longer be with us, at least we still have David Foster Wallace’s wonderful novels and essays to make this world a little less lonely.
3.5/5
As often with posthumous collections, Both Flesh and Not suffers slightly from the fact that these essays were bound together for the simple reason of producing another book to fill the shelves and minds of DFW’s perfervid fans and readers. It was only fitting to release another collection of essays riding on the heels of D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, and with his other posthumous work, The Pale King, having been nominated for the Pulitzer. While all of these essays are available elsewhere, and do seem a bit thrown together in an all-too-short collection, having a new Wallace book in my hands is a reason to celebrate. The essays are full of his charm, with his biting wit and humor that is sure to make anyone laugh, and the great, impassioned rants he composes for palm-in-the-face blunders such as Williamson’s Borges biography. Despite being slightly disappointing compared to, say, Consider the Lobster, this is a great collection that is sure to satisfy anyone else jonesing for more DFW.
This collection is signature DFW. Starting off on his Federer essay, it is always a pleasure to feel Wallace’s excitement and pure joy for tennis flowing off the page. It was also enjoyable as I too am a fan of Roger Federer and could share in his passion for expressing how cool it is to witness amazing Federer moments. Through all these essays, you feel more as if Wallace is communicating with you instead of merely lecturing at you, which is a large part of why I really enjoy his writing. It always feels like his major purpose aside from informing is to get you as equally excited about the subject as he is. Such as in essays like 24 Word Notes, which is a great companion piece to his Authority and American Usage in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, DFW has the ability to make studying grammar seem like some sort of rock star lifestyle. He makes grammar cool, exciting, and enjoyable (he also makes me painfully aware I need to work on my own grammar). He also has an amazing ability to give what seems like a fair, even assessment of his topics, such as his essay on the ‘Conspicuously Young’ writers, the literary Brat Pack, where he both defends them while pointing out the criticisms that are ‘mean, but unfortunately fair’. This essay is one to surely not miss.
Humor is a big draw to DFW, and his way of insulting a topic in such a way that you can’t help but rolling on the floor laughing as you nod your head in agreement. He has a gift for tearing things apart with his wit, such as in the essay on Terminator 2 (which, in turn, is an essay widely praising Cameron’s early work in Aliens and the first Terminator):
'1990s moviegoers who have sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like “Twister” and “Volcano” and “The Lost World” can thank James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” for inaugurating what’s become this decade’s special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. “Porn” because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they’re eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like “Terminator 2″ and “Jurassic Park” aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes — scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff — strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.'DFW successfully explains the major problems of the 90s blockbuster. He does use the sexual metaphor often, and in the essay The New Fire, which deals with AIDs as the Dragon standing in the way of the sexual revolution Knight.
The major issue with this collection is that it simply takes essays from all over his career and tosses them together. Many are rather short, a few being only 2-3 pages (although I loved to read his thoughts on Zbigniew Herbert ), and many seem to work more as a companion to essays in earlier collections. It is a great book for a fan who has already explored much of his work, granted they had not already read most of these online, but I would advise new readers to come back for this one later. It was slightly disappointing is well that the best essay in the collection is one I had already read when I first experienced Markson’s wonderful Wittgenstein’s Mistress. In a later essay, Wallace says of WM ‘that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country’. That, coming from Wallace, is high praise.
Despite the shortcomings, this was still an enjoyable read. It always breaks my heart to think of Wallace and his tragic end, especially as much of his work deals with loneliness. There are many times I wish I could have given him an enormous hug and said ‘I love you man, please don’t leave us’. While he may no longer be with us, at least we still have David Foster Wallace’s wonderful novels and essays to make this world a little less lonely.
3.5/5
May 10, 2023
Having had the pleasant experience recently of going back to Proust after a ten-year gap and discovering that, yes, his writing is quite compelling after all, I thought I'd revisit another writer I didn't seem to get on with the first time round. The last time I read David Foster Wallace was in 2013, when I waded through Infinite Jest with a mounting sense of disillusionment, to say nothing of a mounting improvement in wrist strength. But I thought perhaps he might be more fun over short distances.
Unfortunately, as the brace of stars will have intimated, this wasn't the case for me. In fact, reading these essays brought back a lot of long-suppressed memories and nervous tics, in much the same way that a backfiring car will cause a veteran two streets away to reflexively hit the deck. I'd forgotten what he's like. And my Post-Wallace Stress Disorder is apparently still with me.
It is not that I don't appreciate what he has to say. He's often very interesting. The essay on Roger Federer which opens the collection (and which is the best thing in here) is full of knowledgeable insights both on tennis as a sport and on the experience of being at Wimbledon. Well, I thought, we're off to a good start here.
Not that everything he says stands up. His suggestion that his generation ‘might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing’ sounds pretty ridiculous. But that stuff isn't the problem, the problem is that his main appeal is as a prose stylist, and I can't stand his prose style.
I need to come at this from a couple of different directions at once to try and explain why reading him annoys me so much – because after turning the pages for a while, I feel this overwhelming sense of fury rising up in me, it's crazy. On the one hand, he has this very distinctive style made up of faux-folksy colloquialisms (‘what-all’), breezy obscurity (‘Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here…’), random abbreviations and initialisms (‘the E flank’, ‘the PM sunshine’, ‘w/’) and even symbols (‘the following main-text ¶ itself is geared to a very-strong-math-background audience; nobody else is going to get the ¶'s references’). But on the other hand, he laces his opinions with nonsensical value-judgments on other people's use of the English language.
Either one of these on their own would be OK. There are plenty of writers whose style I don't like that much; this doesn't irritate me, I just don't read them very often. And there are more than a few grammatical sticklers, who, admittedly, I find uncongenial, but at least they have the decency to write fairly correct prose.
Wallace tries to have it both ways, and it honestly infuriates me. How this guy has the fucking chutzpah to complain, at length, about how unacceptably ‘casual’ it is to use ‘as’ in the sense of ‘since, because’ (a usage that, far from being an innovation, goes all the way back to Old English), when he himself is beginning sentences with ‘Too, …’ or ‘Like, …’ or even ‘But and so’, is beyond me. Or taking exception to people (like Shakespeare) who use ‘dialogue’ as a verb, when he is happy to say things like ‘the dictionary obsoleted it’.
Wallace throws fancy-looking foreign terms around like glitter, but constantly gets them wrong – ‘q.v.’, for instance, is misused every single time it appears (he seems to think it means ‘see’, which it doesn't – if you want a wanky Latin term for that, you can say vide). More annoying than the mistakes, though – which we're all subject to – are the aggressive hypercorrections, with some of his constructions so pointedly correct that, in effect, they end up being wrong, in the sense of having completely lost contact with how language is actually used. ‘Whom do you think you're talking to?’ is perhaps defensible, though no one has ever used ‘whom’ in anger. But then he'll say something like, ‘all we C[onspicuously] Y[oung] writers get consistently lumped together’, which I mean – has anyone used ‘all we’ for ‘all of us’ since the fucking 1700s?
Again, I don't care about this stuff on its own. What I hate is the way he can write that kind of thing, and then turn around and tell other people off for their sloppy language. His claims about what is ‘correct’ and what ‘wrong’ are always based vaguely on the authority of ‘high-end readers’, ‘educated people’, ‘smart readers’, which are all weasel words for ‘David Foster Wallace's intuition’ (hence why no actual data is ever adduced). The suggestion is always that these things help improve ‘clarity’ or ‘meaning’, but one is inclined to have doubts – and in Wallace's case, he comes right out and tells you what's going on:
This gets to the heart of why I can't stand his general stance – because it isn't about being clear or correct at all, it's about looking down your nose at others. It's ugly and it's damaging and it's one of the reasons people have such terrible hang-ups about their own language use. (Incidentally, and inevitably, his insistence that ‘who/whom’ must only be used for people and ‘that’ only for things is contravened only a few pages later when he refers to ‘a publishing company whom you trust’.)
Writers are terrible at understanding why they can write well, and a lot of them seem to think it has something to do with their grasp of grammar, which it normally doesn't (except to the extent that they are functionally literate). Usain Bolt can run very fast, but he shouldn't be teaching anatomy classes. EB White and Christopher Hitchens can write very well, but they need to shut the fuck up about the passive voice. So it's not like Wallace is unique here – it's just especially egregious in his case because his own dubious style is founded so heavily on linguistic idiosyncrasy.
And in the end, this has far-reaching consequences for the way I read all his stuff, because ultimately I just don't trust anything he says. Wallace doesn't approach any subject, it seems to me, in a spirit of open inquiry or generosity, but rather as a blowhard with a lot of set opinions on something that he wants to impart to you. In Infinite Jest, this is at least interspersed with a lot of genuine heartfelt novelistic attempts to communicate metaphysical and mental concerns, whereas in an essay there isn't much scope for that.
So all his forcedly colloquial chattiness ends up coming across as a kind of de haut en bas routine, the condescension of someone who wants you to understand that he knows a lot more than you but hasn't forgotten how to speak to the plebs. I'm afraid that after 320 pages of it, it had well and truly set my teeth on edge. Maybe I'll have more luck in another ten years.
Unfortunately, as the brace of stars will have intimated, this wasn't the case for me. In fact, reading these essays brought back a lot of long-suppressed memories and nervous tics, in much the same way that a backfiring car will cause a veteran two streets away to reflexively hit the deck. I'd forgotten what he's like. And my Post-Wallace Stress Disorder is apparently still with me.
It is not that I don't appreciate what he has to say. He's often very interesting. The essay on Roger Federer which opens the collection (and which is the best thing in here) is full of knowledgeable insights both on tennis as a sport and on the experience of being at Wimbledon. Well, I thought, we're off to a good start here.
Not that everything he says stands up. His suggestion that his generation ‘might well come to regard AIDS as a blessing’ sounds pretty ridiculous. But that stuff isn't the problem, the problem is that his main appeal is as a prose stylist, and I can't stand his prose style.
I need to come at this from a couple of different directions at once to try and explain why reading him annoys me so much – because after turning the pages for a while, I feel this overwhelming sense of fury rising up in me, it's crazy. On the one hand, he has this very distinctive style made up of faux-folksy colloquialisms (‘what-all’), breezy obscurity (‘Given the Gramm-Rudmanesque space limit here…’), random abbreviations and initialisms (‘the E flank’, ‘the PM sunshine’, ‘w/’) and even symbols (‘the following main-text ¶ itself is geared to a very-strong-math-background audience; nobody else is going to get the ¶'s references’). But on the other hand, he laces his opinions with nonsensical value-judgments on other people's use of the English language.
Either one of these on their own would be OK. There are plenty of writers whose style I don't like that much; this doesn't irritate me, I just don't read them very often. And there are more than a few grammatical sticklers, who, admittedly, I find uncongenial, but at least they have the decency to write fairly correct prose.
Wallace tries to have it both ways, and it honestly infuriates me. How this guy has the fucking chutzpah to complain, at length, about how unacceptably ‘casual’ it is to use ‘as’ in the sense of ‘since, because’ (a usage that, far from being an innovation, goes all the way back to Old English), when he himself is beginning sentences with ‘Too, …’ or ‘Like, …’ or even ‘But and so’, is beyond me. Or taking exception to people (like Shakespeare) who use ‘dialogue’ as a verb, when he is happy to say things like ‘the dictionary obsoleted it’.
Wallace throws fancy-looking foreign terms around like glitter, but constantly gets them wrong – ‘q.v.’, for instance, is misused every single time it appears (he seems to think it means ‘see’, which it doesn't – if you want a wanky Latin term for that, you can say vide). More annoying than the mistakes, though – which we're all subject to – are the aggressive hypercorrections, with some of his constructions so pointedly correct that, in effect, they end up being wrong, in the sense of having completely lost contact with how language is actually used. ‘Whom do you think you're talking to?’ is perhaps defensible, though no one has ever used ‘whom’ in anger. But then he'll say something like, ‘all we C[onspicuously] Y[oung] writers get consistently lumped together’, which I mean – has anyone used ‘all we’ for ‘all of us’ since the fucking 1700s?
Again, I don't care about this stuff on its own. What I hate is the way he can write that kind of thing, and then turn around and tell other people off for their sloppy language. His claims about what is ‘correct’ and what ‘wrong’ are always based vaguely on the authority of ‘high-end readers’, ‘educated people’, ‘smart readers’, which are all weasel words for ‘David Foster Wallace's intuition’ (hence why no actual data is ever adduced). The suggestion is always that these things help improve ‘clarity’ or ‘meaning’, but one is inclined to have doubts – and in Wallace's case, he comes right out and tells you what's going on:
As of 2003, misusing that for who or whom, whether in writing or speech, functions as a kind of class-marker—it's the grammatical equivalent of wearing NASCAR paraphernalia or liking pro wrestling.
This gets to the heart of why I can't stand his general stance – because it isn't about being clear or correct at all, it's about looking down your nose at others. It's ugly and it's damaging and it's one of the reasons people have such terrible hang-ups about their own language use. (Incidentally, and inevitably, his insistence that ‘who/whom’ must only be used for people and ‘that’ only for things is contravened only a few pages later when he refers to ‘a publishing company whom you trust’.)
Writers are terrible at understanding why they can write well, and a lot of them seem to think it has something to do with their grasp of grammar, which it normally doesn't (except to the extent that they are functionally literate). Usain Bolt can run very fast, but he shouldn't be teaching anatomy classes. EB White and Christopher Hitchens can write very well, but they need to shut the fuck up about the passive voice. So it's not like Wallace is unique here – it's just especially egregious in his case because his own dubious style is founded so heavily on linguistic idiosyncrasy.
And in the end, this has far-reaching consequences for the way I read all his stuff, because ultimately I just don't trust anything he says. Wallace doesn't approach any subject, it seems to me, in a spirit of open inquiry or generosity, but rather as a blowhard with a lot of set opinions on something that he wants to impart to you. In Infinite Jest, this is at least interspersed with a lot of genuine heartfelt novelistic attempts to communicate metaphysical and mental concerns, whereas in an essay there isn't much scope for that.
So all his forcedly colloquial chattiness ends up coming across as a kind of de haut en bas routine, the condescension of someone who wants you to understand that he knows a lot more than you but hasn't forgotten how to speak to the plebs. I'm afraid that after 320 pages of it, it had well and truly set my teeth on edge. Maybe I'll have more luck in another ten years.
November 4, 2012
Most of these essays are online. Some of the titles have been changed. Remember - too much reading on a computer leads to this sort of breakfast! Read the book.
Federer Both Flesh and Not
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/spo...
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com...
The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
Mr. Cogito
Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
Back in New Fire
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2
http://shreddedheart.wordpress.com/20...
The Nature of the Fun
http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat...
Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960
http://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
The Best of the Prose Poem
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
Twenty-Four Word Notes
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
Borges on the Couch
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
Deciderization 2007—A Special Report
http://neugierig.org/content/dfw/best...
Just Asking
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...
February 16, 2013
Not quite up there with ASFTINDA or CTL in terms of sheer stuck-to-the-chair-then-flung-off-the-same-chair-in-squeeing-delight pleasure factor, but BFAN is arguably a more eclectic collection than either, treating us to one courtside tennis feature, one neurotic backstage tennis featurette, an unsurpassable academic-and-not reading of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a deliciously snotty horn-tooting “we’ve arrived, ma!” for his then-emerging fiction contemps, something vague and unappetising about AIDS, a necessary evisceration of Terminator 2, several shavings on being-a-writer and Borges and writing Best Essay intros, a witty and high-level dissection of Math Melodramas, a nasty out-of-character satirical curiosity on “prose poets,” and pedantry from his wet-dream OED contributions. BFAN pretty much traverses the DFW cranium in a startling manner that (arguably) the other two collections miss given the length and content congruencies of the pieces in those respective pubs, and the inclusion of snippings from his private dictionary between each essay here adds to the swirl of facts and data that DFW made it his life’s work to deciderize in charming and unpretentious and intellectually robust ways for his contracted organs and readerships and eventual hardback readers.
December 1, 2020
Not sure if I'd recommend this one. It's DFW, and yes, it's witty, acerbic, articulate, et. al. but the items under discussion did not engage me in the way that Lobster, and Supposedly Fun Thing did in their turn. I'd therefore call this his least successful collection.
They padded the thing with extracts from his vocabulary lists, which I found a might tedious. If I wanted to look up definitions for abstruse words, I'd Google. But why would I? Wallace himself rails against Academese - how people use big words to sound smart. He distinguishes proper smart-writing as extra-precise, and surprising et. al. You could play the double-bind game and say he has to point out snobbery to patently avoid it, and he goes out of his way to call himself a snob, but then tiptoes around the whole snobbery issue elsewhere. It comes off as him not being able to decide whether he wants to embrace the self-image or be repulsed by it. (See "American Usage" essay from Lobster for concrete evidence of snobbery embrasure).
The title essay is a methodical Federer expose, reminiscent of Jest. Plenty of tennis trivia. Not sure I needed the close-up, lengthy descriptions of jock straps etc. Overall, an illuminating, journalistic look at the sport. But again, he's written THE Definitive novel on Tennis. The not-so-Finite Jest. Ergo, this is less impressive.
Also to be found here is his long essay on Wittgenstein's Mistress, which I found more lovely than the novel itself. He studied Witt back in his college thesis days, and he is something of an authority. It helps, if you're like me and didn't get much out of Markson's seminal work, to disabuse you of your disillusions.
In another: Probably the best metaphor for a writer's relationship to his manuscript, a mini-essay, which expands a comparison ripped from Delillo's Mao II. Extremely memorable.
He goes on to review a terrible Borges biography and a duo of novels from the "math prodigy" genre, which latter essay turns out to be well-nigh unbearable.
A Terminator 2/ film industry article flexes his pop culture musculature. A funny and telling thing, that one is.
Then the explanation of "conspicuously" young writers of his generation, up and coming, breaking rules, and a cynical analysis of what they are actually doing. I already knew what he was telling me. Anyone who reads someone like Bret Easton Ellis can get the feel for why it attracted attention. This one made DFW seem like a snide, weasel-shaped anti-writer.
I was entertained. I got more of Wallace's distinct voice. But I was not enthralled.
They padded the thing with extracts from his vocabulary lists, which I found a might tedious. If I wanted to look up definitions for abstruse words, I'd Google. But why would I? Wallace himself rails against Academese - how people use big words to sound smart. He distinguishes proper smart-writing as extra-precise, and surprising et. al. You could play the double-bind game and say he has to point out snobbery to patently avoid it, and he goes out of his way to call himself a snob, but then tiptoes around the whole snobbery issue elsewhere. It comes off as him not being able to decide whether he wants to embrace the self-image or be repulsed by it. (See "American Usage" essay from Lobster for concrete evidence of snobbery embrasure).
The title essay is a methodical Federer expose, reminiscent of Jest. Plenty of tennis trivia. Not sure I needed the close-up, lengthy descriptions of jock straps etc. Overall, an illuminating, journalistic look at the sport. But again, he's written THE Definitive novel on Tennis. The not-so-Finite Jest. Ergo, this is less impressive.
Also to be found here is his long essay on Wittgenstein's Mistress, which I found more lovely than the novel itself. He studied Witt back in his college thesis days, and he is something of an authority. It helps, if you're like me and didn't get much out of Markson's seminal work, to disabuse you of your disillusions.
In another: Probably the best metaphor for a writer's relationship to his manuscript, a mini-essay, which expands a comparison ripped from Delillo's Mao II. Extremely memorable.
He goes on to review a terrible Borges biography and a duo of novels from the "math prodigy" genre, which latter essay turns out to be well-nigh unbearable.
A Terminator 2/ film industry article flexes his pop culture musculature. A funny and telling thing, that one is.
Then the explanation of "conspicuously" young writers of his generation, up and coming, breaking rules, and a cynical analysis of what they are actually doing. I already knew what he was telling me. Anyone who reads someone like Bret Easton Ellis can get the feel for why it attracted attention. This one made DFW seem like a snide, weasel-shaped anti-writer.
I was entertained. I got more of Wallace's distinct voice. But I was not enthralled.
Read
August 21, 2016[update: Howling Fantods has removed many links from their Uncollected DFW page, at the request of Karen and Little Brown. Those removed links are not limited to what is included in this collection.]
Distracted and Dystematic (as it were) Reviewerish Thoughts
We have here a partial collection of pieces by DFW yet uncollected and unbound. Unfortunate it is that a greater effort was not undertaken to assemble all or nearly all the unassembled essays and reviews, letters to editors, etc., because anything would have been at home here next to anything else, no need for thematic unity in a posthumous production. What we have is an unnecessarily short book. Proprietary issues? Who knows.
Read Both Flesh and Not, please, only after having read Dave’s prior essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.
Friend B0nnie has provided Links for the essays included here but available on-line, which appears to be exhaustive.
The Howling Fantods makes available (all?) the (still) available uncollected fiction, non-fiction, and book reviews.
Nothing here not available elsewhere. But some of us, myself amongst, despite being and having been DFW-nuttjobs, due to inabilities to credit anything read upon a screen, have not read these pieces previously, not in their entire entireties. We bought the bound book out of habit. Nothing more.
Newish and perhaps elsewhere unavailable is a selection from the DFW word list which is used to create word art between essays. I read them through the G’s, quit, and have not made up my mind whether I’ll return to them. Funky words funk much harder in DFW sentences than they do in dictionaries.
Two tennis essays here drearied me of ever reading another word of sports writing. Sorry, Dave, even you apparently can’t make me give a damn about tennis anymore. Some nice bits in those pieces, but gods! I just don’t care about professional sports. At all.
“Fictional Futures” is an earlier version (published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1988) of the “E Unibus Pluram” essay, one of my favorite Dave essays.
“The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress" is required reading.
“The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,” previously published as “F/X Porn,” is a nice bit. I like it when Dave does this kind of thing.
“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama,” a review of two novels involving a lot of math stuff, ought to be read in conjunction with Dave’s math book, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. Critics of that book will be interested in DFW’s identification of a conundrum involved in writing a novel about math:
The paradox is that the type of audience most likely to accept and appreciate these novels’ lofty, encomiastic view of pure math is also the audience most apt to be disappointed by the variously vague, reductive, or inconsistent ways the novels handle the actual mathematics they’re concerned with.That would seem to characterize also the responses DFW received for both his math book and the math parts of IJ.
“Borges on the Couch,” naturally, ought to be read in conjunction with the Max bio.
I liked Dave’s review of The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal, ed. Peter Johnson, perhaps because it fed my genre fetish so pleasantly.
And for Snoots and Snoobs, do not miss the “Twenty-Four Word Notes” which Dave wrote for the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.
There’s a nice German typo at page 110n42; “Familienahanlichkeiten (no kidding),” (family resemblances), to which I’ll append a DFW-styled “sic”.
reprise
Please do see B0nnie’s Links because I’m too lazy to mark up the html all over my own review.
February 16, 2013
I loved and appreciated this book more than the four stars might suggest. I loved the way it was formated. I loved revisiting essays I had read previously in New York TImes, Salon, the Atlantic, BAE 2007. I loved the ability to again be surprised by DFW's wit, charm, intelligence, and in the last couple essays anger. Having recently lost a loved one in a rather dramatic fashion, I was also taken back those ordurous emotions I felt on September 12/13, 2008 when I heard that DFW killed himself. In the middle of this enormous banking/economic collapse, losing DFW (to others) might have seemed small. But almost 4.5 years later my 401(k) has recovered but I have yet to get over DFW killing himself. A tad dramatic? I'm sure. Anyway, back to my review of Both Flesh and Not. Part of what I loved about this series of essays was how the publisher used his definitions and usage notes as paragraph breaks. It was brilliant and insightful and actually VERY intimate.
September 18, 2019
Per i fan di David.
O per tutti ....non saprei, io sono dell'idea che tutti dovrebbero leggere ogni cosa scritta da David o anche solo sentire/leggere le sue interviste.
C'è sempre qualcosa di sorprendente e brillante in quel che lui scrive, anche quando è confusionario o incomprensibile, trovi sempre una perla da conservare per sempre con te.
Bello il saggio su l'AIDS, belle le sue interviste, bella la critica a Terminator 2, e poi qua e là sparsi consigli su libri e scrittori che lui ha amato.
Quanto mi manchi David...
una delle cose secondo me spaventose, diciamo così, del nichilismo della cultura contemporanea è che ci stiamo davvero predisponendo al fascismo. Perchè più svuotiamo la cultura di ogni valore, principio ispiratore e principio spirituale, più creiamo una fame che finirà per portarci ad una condizione che ci permette di accettare il fascismo solo perchè....sai, la cosa bella dei fascisti è che ti dicono cosa devi pensare, ti dicono cosa devi fare, ti dicono cosa è importante. E noi come cultura non siamo ancora capaci di farlo da soli.
O per tutti ....non saprei, io sono dell'idea che tutti dovrebbero leggere ogni cosa scritta da David o anche solo sentire/leggere le sue interviste.
C'è sempre qualcosa di sorprendente e brillante in quel che lui scrive, anche quando è confusionario o incomprensibile, trovi sempre una perla da conservare per sempre con te.
Bello il saggio su l'AIDS, belle le sue interviste, bella la critica a Terminator 2, e poi qua e là sparsi consigli su libri e scrittori che lui ha amato.
Quanto mi manchi David...
una delle cose secondo me spaventose, diciamo così, del nichilismo della cultura contemporanea è che ci stiamo davvero predisponendo al fascismo. Perchè più svuotiamo la cultura di ogni valore, principio ispiratore e principio spirituale, più creiamo una fame che finirà per portarci ad una condizione che ci permette di accettare il fascismo solo perchè....sai, la cosa bella dei fascisti è che ti dicono cosa devi pensare, ti dicono cosa devi fare, ti dicono cosa è importante. E noi come cultura non siamo ancora capaci di farlo da soli.
December 16, 2018
A collection of DFW's essays published posthumously, and hence not one of his best collections (because you know, they weren't included in those published when he was still around), but there are still some gems. The following piece, which I'm typing up here in full, is one of the best pieces of writing on writing that I've read.
16 December, 2018
The Nature of the Fun(pp.193-199), originally published in Fiction Writer, 1998.
The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the food of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it—a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception—yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it's yours, the this infant is, it's you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but you also hate it—hate it—because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels...and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool—it's a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.
So you're in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.
Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love a lovely, miraculously perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong: you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you were crazy: you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at least a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, in in certain ways you. And this last, best hope—this'd represent something way worse than just very bad parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.
But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labour-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed wild horses onto his farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between like ten and sixty for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4-F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?
This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works—and it’s terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually start to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don’t even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you’re writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You’re no longer writing just to get yourself off, which—since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow — is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You’ve found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you’re extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you’re doing. The motive of pure personal starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don’t know like you and admire you and think you’re a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive. Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever “ego” means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe “vanity” is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you’re good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, now, writing—your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At this 90+ percent of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will make you disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone.
The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation: fun. And, if you can find your way back to the fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralysing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.
The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.
16 December, 2018
January 1, 2021
These essays are mainly about tennis and literature, which are two of my favourite things. But it's clear that the publishers were scraping the barrel when compiling this collection. The pieces grow increasingly esoteric; one or two are short fragments; and several don't really work so well removed from their original context. DFW is always a pleasure to read, but this one was uneven.
March 15, 2013
This is not DFW best non-fiction collection, but neither is it superfluous nor is it inferior.
There is quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction geared towards readers who arguably would be writers and therefore interested in these subjects. These pieces are:
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young: on the effect of TV on young writers in the 80's. Young writers get divided into camps that now seem rather obvious and even dated as some no longer really exist: Workshop manufactured, chemically neutered, corpse-grinders ("stories as tough to find fault with as they are to remember after putting them down"); catatonic Carver clones, offshoots of the dirty realism fad created by Carver/Lish/Granta; and yuppie nihilists in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis, which, btw, explains BEE's adolescent twitter attacks against DFW coinciding with the publication of this book. These attacks, amusing and pathetic though they were, reminded me of Franzen´s postmortem evisceration of his best friend in The New Yorker. Waiting for someone to die before you can work up the courage to attack them publicly is always a great demonstration of character.
The Empty Plenum: which explains DFW's claim that Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress was a masterpiece and illuminates Wallace's own admiration for late Wittgenstein and his philosophy of language.
Mr. Cogito: basically a blurb for a Zbigniew Herbert's book.
The Nature of fun: on how publishing and any amount of recognition are bad for writers, who should avoid thinking about the reception of their books like the plague. Jeffers famously said about this: "The only fame that is not harmful to a writer is posterity". Classic Wallace double bind stuff.
Five direly underappreciated US novels: self explanatory.
Rhetoric and Math Melodrama: explains why math and literature should not mix. He would've done well to follow his own advice on this.
The Best of the Prose Poem: on why prose poems do not really exist.
Borges on the Couch: against psychoanalytic biographical interpretaions of literature. This bookends nicely with Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky, from CTL.
Deciderization: DFW was made editor of the Best American Essays volume for 2007. Imagine therefore the amount of essayistic hand-wringing involved in Wallace confronting the concept of deciding why one essay is "better" than another.
That pretty much is the extent of the writer´s writer pieces in the book. The other ones are on tennis (Both Flesh and Not: on Federer and the aesthetics of sports; Democracy and Commerce in the US Open: on just that, same approach as ASFTINDA, but with the US Open and way less passion, thoroughly yawn-inducing), on AIDS as an opportunity to reevaluate what sex is and means (Welcome to New Fire), freedom and terrorism (Just asking), on how Hollywood movies can be art and how good directors get corrupted (Terminator) and words, grammar and usage (24 Word Notes).
This last one tickles me because there is a short video of Wallace explaining his dislike of "puff-words", which is the point of his first word criticism on that 24 word list. Very concisely, Wallace's problem with "utilize" is that it is a puff-word for which a simpler more common word exists: "use". This is funny because I can think of very few writers more attuned to how using a more complex synonym for what you are trying to say colors your prose. Wallace, of course, was always wrestling with this polarity (be erudite to the point of snobbery, but also as casual and street-wise as possible). Further, in the video you can see in Wallace's face his disgust for snobs who will steal one extra third of a second from him by using puff-words in one of those very unusual unguarded moments where he is projecting a really negative emotion publicly. I shudder to imagine him having this same reaction after reading some draft of himself he wasn't satisfied with. Hard.
Here´s the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sQr...
There is quite a lot of literary criticism and non-fiction geared towards readers who arguably would be writers and therefore interested in these subjects. These pieces are:
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young: on the effect of TV on young writers in the 80's. Young writers get divided into camps that now seem rather obvious and even dated as some no longer really exist: Workshop manufactured, chemically neutered, corpse-grinders ("stories as tough to find fault with as they are to remember after putting them down"); catatonic Carver clones, offshoots of the dirty realism fad created by Carver/Lish/Granta; and yuppie nihilists in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis, which, btw, explains BEE's adolescent twitter attacks against DFW coinciding with the publication of this book. These attacks, amusing and pathetic though they were, reminded me of Franzen´s postmortem evisceration of his best friend in The New Yorker. Waiting for someone to die before you can work up the courage to attack them publicly is always a great demonstration of character.
The Empty Plenum: which explains DFW's claim that Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress was a masterpiece and illuminates Wallace's own admiration for late Wittgenstein and his philosophy of language.
Mr. Cogito: basically a blurb for a Zbigniew Herbert's book.
The Nature of fun: on how publishing and any amount of recognition are bad for writers, who should avoid thinking about the reception of their books like the plague. Jeffers famously said about this: "The only fame that is not harmful to a writer is posterity". Classic Wallace double bind stuff.
Five direly underappreciated US novels: self explanatory.
Rhetoric and Math Melodrama: explains why math and literature should not mix. He would've done well to follow his own advice on this.
The Best of the Prose Poem: on why prose poems do not really exist.
Borges on the Couch: against psychoanalytic biographical interpretaions of literature. This bookends nicely with Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky, from CTL.
Deciderization: DFW was made editor of the Best American Essays volume for 2007. Imagine therefore the amount of essayistic hand-wringing involved in Wallace confronting the concept of deciding why one essay is "better" than another.
That pretty much is the extent of the writer´s writer pieces in the book. The other ones are on tennis (Both Flesh and Not: on Federer and the aesthetics of sports; Democracy and Commerce in the US Open: on just that, same approach as ASFTINDA, but with the US Open and way less passion, thoroughly yawn-inducing), on AIDS as an opportunity to reevaluate what sex is and means (Welcome to New Fire), freedom and terrorism (Just asking), on how Hollywood movies can be art and how good directors get corrupted (Terminator) and words, grammar and usage (24 Word Notes).
This last one tickles me because there is a short video of Wallace explaining his dislike of "puff-words", which is the point of his first word criticism on that 24 word list. Very concisely, Wallace's problem with "utilize" is that it is a puff-word for which a simpler more common word exists: "use". This is funny because I can think of very few writers more attuned to how using a more complex synonym for what you are trying to say colors your prose. Wallace, of course, was always wrestling with this polarity (be erudite to the point of snobbery, but also as casual and street-wise as possible). Further, in the video you can see in Wallace's face his disgust for snobs who will steal one extra third of a second from him by using puff-words in one of those very unusual unguarded moments where he is projecting a really negative emotion publicly. I shudder to imagine him having this same reaction after reading some draft of himself he wasn't satisfied with. Hard.
Here´s the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sQr...
November 14, 2012
It didn't take me very long to get through DFW's posthumous collection because I'd read most of its essays before. But what's surprising is that I didn't need to reread the essays because I'd internalized them so much. This internalization speaks to the power of DFW's writing - for this reader, at least. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again many times before I shake loose my mortal coil, but DFW's writing seems to be hardwired in my brain.
On to the collection . . .
Which is, as to be expected, terrific. The only reason that I'm not giving it five stars is because it has the feel of an odds-and-sods kind of thing - of a way for the publishers to cash in on DFW's reputation. I mean, does his review of the Borges bio need to be collected? In other words, some of the essays, especially those in the second half of the book, seem to be of minor import. This means that everything from p. 203 on seems kind of tacked on.
But the material that comes before! I've always loved DFW's essays on tennis, and his piece on Federer is one of his finest. I'd already loved Roger before DFW's essay, but the Federer essay made me see the greatest men's player who ever lived in a new light. DFW humanizes the reserved Roger with his humorous and lively prose in this awesome essay. For those of you who don't like RF for being stiff or if you don't understand his brilliance, please read this essay.
The piece on the US Open is also pretty terrific, especially the comments on how Sampras sweats. It's DFW, so the essay is funny and spot on. Don't you want to know how Pete sweats?
DFW's anxiety of influence comes in when he discusses Bret Easton Ellis in the "Fictional Futures" piece. The two writers seem to me to have more in common that DFW is willing to acknowledge. But this essay was written by a very young DFW about a very young BEE. I wonder what DFW would have thought of BEE's later, self-lacerating Lunar Park or the postmodern innovations of Glamorama and Imperial Bedrooms. I think that an older DFW would have liked an older BEE more, although the same can't be said for BEE's take on DFW.
The best essay in this collection - and one of the only ones I hadn't come across before - is on Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Like DFW, I did a lot of philosophy in grad school. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida - really anyone who thought deeply about language and, more specifically, the relationship between being, language, and power - got me all hot and bothered. I've lost a lot of the luster that I've had for theory, but DFW brought it back for me. His claim about the ways in which Markson illustrates the scariness of the early Wittgenstein is tremendous and helps me understand not only Wittgenstein's Mistress a lot better but also the other Markson novels I've read. (Markson is the kind of writer whose books I used to read at Borders, holding my breath to hold in the brilliance of the prose, unable to stop before I finished whatever book I was reading - maybe that's why Wittgenstein's Mistress is the only Markson I own). I love Wittgenstein's Mistress, and DFW made me love it more.
A side note: I bet that Markson does for Wittgenstein what Beckett does for deconstruction. Both writers make difficult theory accessible by dramatizing it and discussing how it relates to the human condition, particularly sadness. But I'd argue that Beckett is better than Markson because of his comedy. Here endeth the side note.
The essay on Cameron's Terminator film as pornography is brilliant and funny. Read it.
The essay on "The Nature of Fun" gets at what it's like to be a writer better than any other essay on the subject I've ever read. I love how DFW expands on DeLillo's Mao II. If you're considering becoming a writer, you need to read this essay. I've shared it with a few friends and family members. It's given me insight into my own writerly psyche and made me think about how I come across to other people.
In conclusion, you need to read this book. It's definitely tougher sledding than DFW's other two collections of essays. It's more theoretical and difficult. But DFW was a lot more than the fun and funny stuff he published in Fun Thing and Lobster. Have fun challenging yourself with this one - and read some Wittgenstein, Markson, DeLillo, Gass, and the other writers DFW cites if you haven't already done so.
P.S. I think that DFW would agree with me that C. McCarthy lost it after Blood Meridian.
On to the collection . . .
Which is, as to be expected, terrific. The only reason that I'm not giving it five stars is because it has the feel of an odds-and-sods kind of thing - of a way for the publishers to cash in on DFW's reputation. I mean, does his review of the Borges bio need to be collected? In other words, some of the essays, especially those in the second half of the book, seem to be of minor import. This means that everything from p. 203 on seems kind of tacked on.
But the material that comes before! I've always loved DFW's essays on tennis, and his piece on Federer is one of his finest. I'd already loved Roger before DFW's essay, but the Federer essay made me see the greatest men's player who ever lived in a new light. DFW humanizes the reserved Roger with his humorous and lively prose in this awesome essay. For those of you who don't like RF for being stiff or if you don't understand his brilliance, please read this essay.
The piece on the US Open is also pretty terrific, especially the comments on how Sampras sweats. It's DFW, so the essay is funny and spot on. Don't you want to know how Pete sweats?
DFW's anxiety of influence comes in when he discusses Bret Easton Ellis in the "Fictional Futures" piece. The two writers seem to me to have more in common that DFW is willing to acknowledge. But this essay was written by a very young DFW about a very young BEE. I wonder what DFW would have thought of BEE's later, self-lacerating Lunar Park or the postmodern innovations of Glamorama and Imperial Bedrooms. I think that an older DFW would have liked an older BEE more, although the same can't be said for BEE's take on DFW.
The best essay in this collection - and one of the only ones I hadn't come across before - is on Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Like DFW, I did a lot of philosophy in grad school. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida - really anyone who thought deeply about language and, more specifically, the relationship between being, language, and power - got me all hot and bothered. I've lost a lot of the luster that I've had for theory, but DFW brought it back for me. His claim about the ways in which Markson illustrates the scariness of the early Wittgenstein is tremendous and helps me understand not only Wittgenstein's Mistress a lot better but also the other Markson novels I've read. (Markson is the kind of writer whose books I used to read at Borders, holding my breath to hold in the brilliance of the prose, unable to stop before I finished whatever book I was reading - maybe that's why Wittgenstein's Mistress is the only Markson I own). I love Wittgenstein's Mistress, and DFW made me love it more.
A side note: I bet that Markson does for Wittgenstein what Beckett does for deconstruction. Both writers make difficult theory accessible by dramatizing it and discussing how it relates to the human condition, particularly sadness. But I'd argue that Beckett is better than Markson because of his comedy. Here endeth the side note.
The essay on Cameron's Terminator film as pornography is brilliant and funny. Read it.
The essay on "The Nature of Fun" gets at what it's like to be a writer better than any other essay on the subject I've ever read. I love how DFW expands on DeLillo's Mao II. If you're considering becoming a writer, you need to read this essay. I've shared it with a few friends and family members. It's given me insight into my own writerly psyche and made me think about how I come across to other people.
In conclusion, you need to read this book. It's definitely tougher sledding than DFW's other two collections of essays. It's more theoretical and difficult. But DFW was a lot more than the fun and funny stuff he published in Fun Thing and Lobster. Have fun challenging yourself with this one - and read some Wittgenstein, Markson, DeLillo, Gass, and the other writers DFW cites if you haven't already done so.
P.S. I think that DFW would agree with me that C. McCarthy lost it after Blood Meridian.
October 9, 2022
Qua e là
Nel corso degli anni credo di aver letto l’opera omnia di D.F.Wallace, per cui a posteriori questa raccolta postuma potevo anche risparmiarmela, tanto sembra un indiscriminato assortimento di brani recuperati da riviste e da varie altre fonti nell’arco di decenni, senza altro requisito che l’essere in qualche modo originati da Wallace, per scritto o trascritto da interviste.
A paragone di “Tennis, Tv, Trigonometria”(1997), “Considera l’aragosta”(2006), “Roger Federer come esperienza religiosa”(2006), pregevoli e compatte selezioni di saggi contenenti diverse perle memorabili, questa “Di carne e di nulla”(2012) dà l’impressione di una collection di secondo piano, di pezzi forse esclusi da altre raccolte o semplicemente dimenticati...
Ovviamente ciò non impedisce che qua e là, dal fondo del barile, affiorino il talento e l’originale pensiero dello scrittore di Ithaca, ma purtroppo il materiale rinunciabile è tanto, o riferito ad argomenti di interesse prettamente USA, oppure perchè piuttosto datato o infine frutto di un Wallace che si inerpica su temi di filosofia matematica risultandomi pressoché incomprensibile (per mio deficit intellettuale specifico…).
C’è anche molto cinema in queste pagine, con un lungo dialogo/dibattito con Gus Van Sant incentrato soprattutto su “Good Will Hunting”, da poco uscito sugli schermi quando avvenne l’intervista telefonica fra scrittore e regista. Ancora in ambito cinematografico è interessante notare l’affilata attitudine critica e la profonda capacità di osservazione di Wallace (che in “Tennis, Tv, Trigonometria…” avevamo visto applicata al cinema di David Lynch) alle prese con una pellicola insospettabile come Terminator 2. Wallace si conferma qui in grado di trarre riflessioni illuminanti e significati reconditi, non solo da capolavori indiscussi che hanno fatto la storia del grande schermo, ma perfino dal cinema più schiettamente popolare.
Per quanto mi riguarda, la scarsa soddisfazione prodotta da questa lettura è un segnale che, dopo tredici tappe, possa concludersi il mio bel viaggio attraverso la bibliografia di DFW; tuttavia mi sono ripromesso di completarlo nel 2023 con la biografia “Ogni storia d’amore è una storia di fantasmi” a cura di D.T.Max, pur prevedendo che mi farà soffrire, senza la speranza di un lieto fine.
Nel corso degli anni credo di aver letto l’opera omnia di D.F.Wallace, per cui a posteriori questa raccolta postuma potevo anche risparmiarmela, tanto sembra un indiscriminato assortimento di brani recuperati da riviste e da varie altre fonti nell’arco di decenni, senza altro requisito che l’essere in qualche modo originati da Wallace, per scritto o trascritto da interviste.
A paragone di “Tennis, Tv, Trigonometria”(1997), “Considera l’aragosta”(2006), “Roger Federer come esperienza religiosa”(2006), pregevoli e compatte selezioni di saggi contenenti diverse perle memorabili, questa “Di carne e di nulla”(2012) dà l’impressione di una collection di secondo piano, di pezzi forse esclusi da altre raccolte o semplicemente dimenticati...
Ovviamente ciò non impedisce che qua e là, dal fondo del barile, affiorino il talento e l’originale pensiero dello scrittore di Ithaca, ma purtroppo il materiale rinunciabile è tanto, o riferito ad argomenti di interesse prettamente USA, oppure perchè piuttosto datato o infine frutto di un Wallace che si inerpica su temi di filosofia matematica risultandomi pressoché incomprensibile (per mio deficit intellettuale specifico…).
C’è anche molto cinema in queste pagine, con un lungo dialogo/dibattito con Gus Van Sant incentrato soprattutto su “Good Will Hunting”, da poco uscito sugli schermi quando avvenne l’intervista telefonica fra scrittore e regista. Ancora in ambito cinematografico è interessante notare l’affilata attitudine critica e la profonda capacità di osservazione di Wallace (che in “Tennis, Tv, Trigonometria…” avevamo visto applicata al cinema di David Lynch) alle prese con una pellicola insospettabile come Terminator 2. Wallace si conferma qui in grado di trarre riflessioni illuminanti e significati reconditi, non solo da capolavori indiscussi che hanno fatto la storia del grande schermo, ma perfino dal cinema più schiettamente popolare.
Per quanto mi riguarda, la scarsa soddisfazione prodotta da questa lettura è un segnale che, dopo tredici tappe, possa concludersi il mio bel viaggio attraverso la bibliografia di DFW; tuttavia mi sono ripromesso di completarlo nel 2023 con la biografia “Ogni storia d’amore è una storia di fantasmi” a cura di D.T.Max, pur prevedendo che mi farà soffrire, senza la speranza di un lieto fine.
Read
January 9, 2020We all miss you, Dave.
Want to read
September 7, 2012just seeing the cover of a new DFW book turns me into an all-id slavering animal child—gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme!!
June 30, 2015
There’s this awesome book shop in central Oslo- one of a chain called Ark. They have the best collection of books in English I’ve seen in a long time, even having traipsed through so many of various size, including that massive Waterstone’s in London… every time I go in somewhere, I’m never able to browse like I’d want. More often than not, if it’s on the shelves, I don’t wanna read it. This is admittedly an unknowable combo both of (1) my tastes just not aligning to what majorly sells and (2) me applying my childishly stubborn “no club that would have me as a member”- life philosophy to reading matter. But in Ark, even on completely stocked shelves they have made room for multiple copies of every published DFW book. Even Signifying Rappers! And while I now own paper copies of most of his stuff, seeing it all there makes me wanna run my arm along the shelf, scoop it all up and devour it. And the copy of Both Flesh and Not looks so inviting with that thick, rough card cover- and are the elastic bands embossed? I don’t know because I’m imposing a ban from book shops on myself, especially ones in Norway. They just got 2666 in Bokmål and it costs 500 fucking NOK. 500!!
Luckily, most of these essays are available online. This is a review of those.
Wallace’s essays create an accessible entry point into his fiction for the reason that there is no agenda beyond communication in the essays, whereas his fiction invites analysis and obscurity (even then, only slightly- maximalism gives way to open communication above dense ambiguity.) The more Wallace you read, the more his material, upon return, is enriched with new insight, for the reason that I imagine he and many other authors would deny for fear of not having done their job (eg. in their persistent hatred of interviews): writers let slip their world views the more you hang around them, and in so doing reveal the similes, analogies and favourite aphorisms that underpin their works of fiction (but of course if you were an author, you’d hate the fact that your novel was not in and of itself all the material necessary for its own deconstruction/ communication- I will explain a bit further down about the concept of the inherently imperfect writing project, which I think links well with the concept in Wallace’s Good Old Neon that not all thought can be captured, no one can be truly known- no communication captures everything necessary.)
I have two pieces of writing in the head/hard drive vault that have/ do require a… how would DFW put it? 2,000 coitus-pounds’ (ie. one metric “fuckton’s”) worth of research, which is causing me much more anxiety than it is joy to discover interesting new things and present them in an entertaining manner that others might enjoy too. Mostly because I fear stating the obvious, or the joy of my intense research and redrafting and rewriting and redrafting and rewriting being bypassed as it faces the indie author scrutiny once again of “While I’m reading this, I shall allow myself to primarily consider just why this guy couldn’t get published.” While writing first drafts, this anxiety, one which may well be completely in my own head, pushes my tone into “Listen here, you, I know some stuff!” mode.
But DFW reassures me in that it is his infectious curiosity as a learner in every role he is asked to perform that is the joy, his need to present and explain the constructs of every piece he has been commissioned to write (“This is how I got to being asked to write this, this is what this piece requires and this is how I’m going to go about this and let me address the inherent caveats of the piece’s intent”) that presents a rare clarity in lieu of attempting a watertight authorial tone, and always an understanding that there are imperfections in the implicit contract between reader and writer in any piece of writing ever. And so I am reminded that more than professional, more than prestigious, more than achingly cool, clever, superciliously opaque, the things that make writing great are INSIGHT and FUN (also see my recent SINCERITY and HOPE blog post.) And this is what Wallace does best: “I was asked to do this thing I’d never done before, so I looked into it, and look at all this stuff I found out!” And as for repeating stuff the reader already knows, if ever I already know a fact that DFW presents me with, if anything I’m thankful that he doesn’t appear to operate in an intellectual dimension of the world I’m not completely unfamiliar with, that the planes of what we both have spent our time thinking about have occasionally intersected. Even those essays on stuff I’m not all that concerned with, like tennis or high concept maths for example, I’m unable to think of as a priori uninteresting to me, and rather as avenues into these subjects, or at the very least a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be someone who is interested in these subjects, as Wallace effusively reveals what passion there is in any area or topic.
And as complex as his essays can appear, they are never scarily high brow- there are delightfully petty jabs here and there, and sometimes downright cruel observations that give you the impression that Wallace is sharing the story of his essay with you and you alone. And it doesn’t appear that any gauntlet ever thrown down to Wallace was ever rejected for its triviality, as I previously noted about why he would go to a porn awards show or a lobster festival (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays), or as one might think considering his deconstruction of the early films of James Cameron or his time with a ranting radio host whose borderline racist shoulders strain under the weight of the many chips resting upon them. While I’ve frequently found passages in his fiction relentlessly dismal, pessimistic, uncomfortable (perhaps usefully so, but nevertheless), in his essays, Wallace approaches every subject with the notion that insight is available everywhere, which is the truth of his intent in fiction of making the reader “brave” certain uncomfortable truths about living: there is useful insight within. This is a great attitude for anyone to have.
Some people may berate the verbosity or the length or the footnotes, but once again they are all signs of pure ebullience on Wallace’s part, making next to any structure or digression completely allowable, and his writing far easier to read and far more forgivable for its flaws than almost all shorter, more straightforward, less blown out and more on-rails writing.
While Wallace may be a hipster talisman, as I pointed out in my Gravity’s Rainbow review, there is a reason that something short of commercial amasses a loyal following of enthusiastic recommenders. You can trust me on that because there were only so many times I could listen to Fever Ray or attempt to enjoy Paul Thomas Anderson films or that I decided one Danielewski novel in this lifetime was enough (just in time to save myself, what is it, 30 books’ worth of time on his new series?), and yet while I may in the past have lauded any of these people to seem cool, still you will find my chants of Wallace far more persistent.
Below, some learnings from these essays that I will make use of later:
Luckily, most of these essays are available online. This is a review of those.
Wallace’s essays create an accessible entry point into his fiction for the reason that there is no agenda beyond communication in the essays, whereas his fiction invites analysis and obscurity (even then, only slightly- maximalism gives way to open communication above dense ambiguity.) The more Wallace you read, the more his material, upon return, is enriched with new insight, for the reason that I imagine he and many other authors would deny for fear of not having done their job (eg. in their persistent hatred of interviews): writers let slip their world views the more you hang around them, and in so doing reveal the similes, analogies and favourite aphorisms that underpin their works of fiction (but of course if you were an author, you’d hate the fact that your novel was not in and of itself all the material necessary for its own deconstruction/ communication- I will explain a bit further down about the concept of the inherently imperfect writing project, which I think links well with the concept in Wallace’s Good Old Neon that not all thought can be captured, no one can be truly known- no communication captures everything necessary.)
I have two pieces of writing in the head/hard drive vault that have/ do require a… how would DFW put it? 2,000 coitus-pounds’ (ie. one metric “fuckton’s”) worth of research, which is causing me much more anxiety than it is joy to discover interesting new things and present them in an entertaining manner that others might enjoy too. Mostly because I fear stating the obvious, or the joy of my intense research and redrafting and rewriting and redrafting and rewriting being bypassed as it faces the indie author scrutiny once again of “While I’m reading this, I shall allow myself to primarily consider just why this guy couldn’t get published.” While writing first drafts, this anxiety, one which may well be completely in my own head, pushes my tone into “Listen here, you, I know some stuff!” mode.
But DFW reassures me in that it is his infectious curiosity as a learner in every role he is asked to perform that is the joy, his need to present and explain the constructs of every piece he has been commissioned to write (“This is how I got to being asked to write this, this is what this piece requires and this is how I’m going to go about this and let me address the inherent caveats of the piece’s intent”) that presents a rare clarity in lieu of attempting a watertight authorial tone, and always an understanding that there are imperfections in the implicit contract between reader and writer in any piece of writing ever. And so I am reminded that more than professional, more than prestigious, more than achingly cool, clever, superciliously opaque, the things that make writing great are INSIGHT and FUN (also see my recent SINCERITY and HOPE blog post.) And this is what Wallace does best: “I was asked to do this thing I’d never done before, so I looked into it, and look at all this stuff I found out!” And as for repeating stuff the reader already knows, if ever I already know a fact that DFW presents me with, if anything I’m thankful that he doesn’t appear to operate in an intellectual dimension of the world I’m not completely unfamiliar with, that the planes of what we both have spent our time thinking about have occasionally intersected. Even those essays on stuff I’m not all that concerned with, like tennis or high concept maths for example, I’m unable to think of as a priori uninteresting to me, and rather as avenues into these subjects, or at the very least a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be someone who is interested in these subjects, as Wallace effusively reveals what passion there is in any area or topic.
And as complex as his essays can appear, they are never scarily high brow- there are delightfully petty jabs here and there, and sometimes downright cruel observations that give you the impression that Wallace is sharing the story of his essay with you and you alone. And it doesn’t appear that any gauntlet ever thrown down to Wallace was ever rejected for its triviality, as I previously noted about why he would go to a porn awards show or a lobster festival (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays), or as one might think considering his deconstruction of the early films of James Cameron or his time with a ranting radio host whose borderline racist shoulders strain under the weight of the many chips resting upon them. While I’ve frequently found passages in his fiction relentlessly dismal, pessimistic, uncomfortable (perhaps usefully so, but nevertheless), in his essays, Wallace approaches every subject with the notion that insight is available everywhere, which is the truth of his intent in fiction of making the reader “brave” certain uncomfortable truths about living: there is useful insight within. This is a great attitude for anyone to have.
Some people may berate the verbosity or the length or the footnotes, but once again they are all signs of pure ebullience on Wallace’s part, making next to any structure or digression completely allowable, and his writing far easier to read and far more forgivable for its flaws than almost all shorter, more straightforward, less blown out and more on-rails writing.
While Wallace may be a hipster talisman, as I pointed out in my Gravity’s Rainbow review, there is a reason that something short of commercial amasses a loyal following of enthusiastic recommenders. You can trust me on that because there were only so many times I could listen to Fever Ray or attempt to enjoy Paul Thomas Anderson films or that I decided one Danielewski novel in this lifetime was enough (just in time to save myself, what is it, 30 books’ worth of time on his new series?), and yet while I may in the past have lauded any of these people to seem cool, still you will find my chants of Wallace far more persistent.
Below, some learnings from these essays that I will make use of later:
July 29, 2013
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5677301...
Though obviously not the exciting essay collections of Consider the Lobster, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, this collection suffices to satisfy my jones for more David Foster Wallace and relaxes my need for any more based on these basic retreads of pieces obviously not up to making the grade in his previous works. The two sport pieces, one on Federer and one about the U.S. Open, were both engaging to their core whether you happen to like tennis or not. What I liked most about Wallace was his ability to make almost anything he wrote interesting and worth reading. No matter what his subject, with the exception of math and poetry, I found his writing captivating and full of his own personality, which is something I am enthralled with in no little measure.
I am not as enamored with David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress as Wallace and others seem to regale it, but his essay proved to be one many people read and agree with. When Wallace deconstructs poetry and fiction I also rarely agree with him and find his thinking off base, but still, he always makes his words so much fun to read. And speaking of fun he even wrote an essay that included Don DeLillo and the fun of writing in it, which is an enormous stretch too as DeLillo, for me, is rarely fun and so intense I generally need to mist to cool off my brain from thinking. But his essay on Terminator 2 was so good it made me watch Terminator 1 for the very first time. This essay alone made the book definitely worth the purchase price.
Deciderization 2007 and Just Asking were both very good essays that shed more light on our "best of" series as well as if some things are actually worth dying for. I finished the book as if riding my bicycle with my back to a strong wind. It was easy and sad and filling, and I think I am done reading anymore "new" essay collections or novels of David Foster Wallace just because I don't think he wanted anymore published, even this one.
Though obviously not the exciting essay collections of Consider the Lobster, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again, this collection suffices to satisfy my jones for more David Foster Wallace and relaxes my need for any more based on these basic retreads of pieces obviously not up to making the grade in his previous works. The two sport pieces, one on Federer and one about the U.S. Open, were both engaging to their core whether you happen to like tennis or not. What I liked most about Wallace was his ability to make almost anything he wrote interesting and worth reading. No matter what his subject, with the exception of math and poetry, I found his writing captivating and full of his own personality, which is something I am enthralled with in no little measure.
I am not as enamored with David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress as Wallace and others seem to regale it, but his essay proved to be one many people read and agree with. When Wallace deconstructs poetry and fiction I also rarely agree with him and find his thinking off base, but still, he always makes his words so much fun to read. And speaking of fun he even wrote an essay that included Don DeLillo and the fun of writing in it, which is an enormous stretch too as DeLillo, for me, is rarely fun and so intense I generally need to mist to cool off my brain from thinking. But his essay on Terminator 2 was so good it made me watch Terminator 1 for the very first time. This essay alone made the book definitely worth the purchase price.
Deciderization 2007 and Just Asking were both very good essays that shed more light on our "best of" series as well as if some things are actually worth dying for. I finished the book as if riding my bicycle with my back to a strong wind. It was easy and sad and filling, and I think I am done reading anymore "new" essay collections or novels of David Foster Wallace just because I don't think he wanted anymore published, even this one.
September 18, 2012
As might be expected from a posthumous essay collection, this is a bit uneven. The title piece on Roger Federer is amazing, and several other pieces are quite good. But a couple of long pieces from the '80s and '90s were passed over for inclusion in prior collections, and it's apparent why. The one on Conspicuously Young writers rambles, is a kind of stiff, and its discussion of TV's influence on his generation is better fleshed out in "E Unibus Plurum." And his Tennis Magazine piece on commerce at the U.S. Open, while it features some great writing (especially on the sport itself, the experience of watching, and on his experience of watching the fans), it gets bogged down in both hyper-observational specificity and in amassing support for its thesis. There are some fun and/or thoughtful, shorter pieces, especially in the book's latter half, like his round-up of five great post-1960 novels, his 24 thoughts on word usage, his philosophies around Terminator 2 (which is a middle distance essay, really), etc. This collection is worth reading, but selectively. If you haven't read A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster yet, hit those first.
October 7, 2013
Era il 2008 quando David Foster Wallace decise di togliersi la vita. Nel 2013 sembra essere esplosa la mania di celebrare l’anniversario dei cinque anni di quel triste evento. In rapida successione sono usciti in Italia la biografica a cura di T. D. Max, la raccolta di Minimum Fax Un antidoto contro la solitudine, e questo Di carne e di nulla pubblicato da Einaudi e che fa da contraltare saggistico alla raccolta di racconti di qualche anno fa, sempre di Einaudi, Questa è l’acqua. Chiudendo magari un occhio per simpatia e coraggio sull’operazione di Minimum Fax, che ha puntato su Wallace fin da subito e in tempi non sospetti, viene da domandarsi il motivo di tutto questo materiale mandato alle stampe, a fronte di un anniversario che, va beh, sono cinque anni mica un decennio. La fuggevole rapidità con cui passa il tempo unita alla nuova unità di misura dell’era moderna, durante la quale tutto ha una vita assai più breve, pare avere accorciato notevolmente l’intervallo dopo il quale è giusto celebrare qualcosa. Così come oggi bisogna sentirsi fortunati a festeggiare cinque anni di matrimonio, contro le nozze d’argento o addirittura d’oro di qualche generazione fa, anche il ricordo di un grande scrittore deve essere celebrato a breve distanza. Forse c’è la paura (infondata) che se non ci si fosse mossi con una certa urgenza gli attuali lettori smemorati si sarebbero presto dimenticati di Wallace, o piuttosto per seguire l’antico detto secondo cui è meglio battere il ferro finché è caldo. Fatto sta che una volta finito di leggere questa raccolta di saggi ci si trova davanti a una sensazione straniante che nasce da una domanda piuttosto lecita. La sensazione straniante è ovviamente quella che tu, lettore affamato di Wallace, avresti letto appunto qualsiasi cosa quest’ultimo avesse avuto modo di scrivere, e sotto questo aspetto il libro è come dell’acqua offerta a un assetato in mezzo al deserto. Ma, c’è un ma. È la domanda che ti fa salire in gola quel gusto acido capace di rovinarti un po’ la lettura, ovvero: se tutti questi i saggi sono davvero indispensabili, come mai non sono stati pubblicati prima? E la domanda diventa anche più insidiosa quando ti accorgi che alcuni articoli proposti nella versione americana sono stati sostituiti da alcune trascrizioni di interviste proprio perché già precedentemente pubblicati (quelli relativi al tennis usciti sotto il titolo di Il tennis come esperienza religiosa). Il caso appare lampante se si prende in esame il saggio Notazioni su ventiquattro parole, nel quale Wallace analizza una lista di vocaboli americani annotandone il giusto utilizzo e commentandoli brevemente. È davvero utile al lettore italiano leggere una cosa del genere? Soprattutto se si considera il fatto che il più delle volte il traduttore non riesce a restituire in italiano il senso errato di alcune scelte sintattiche inglesi.
È un esempio, sia chiaro. Alcune altre cose sono davvero interessanti, come per esempio l’articolo sull’Aids o quello su Terminator 2 (il quale ti spinge a chiederti: chissà cosa avrebbe pensato Wallace di fronte a quel colosso di effetti speciali e retorica di Avatar?). Sarà che quando finisci di leggere il libro ti rimane in bocca quell’amaro senso di non più che difficilmente riesci a toglierti di dosso, e che ti assilla tanto da farti vedere le cose negative più grandi di quelle positive. Sarà anche che chiudere con le trascrizioni delle interviste e delle conversazioni non è stata proprio un’idea brillante (in queste il lavoro stilistico di Wallace viene meno trattandosi di riproduzioni del parlato nudo e crudo). Alla fine sei appagato, si è vero, ma ti torna di continuo in testa la sensazione che dare alle stampe questo libro sia stato non tanto un regalo ai lettori italiani di Wallace, quanto piuttosto un regalo alle casse dell’editore.
È un esempio, sia chiaro. Alcune altre cose sono davvero interessanti, come per esempio l’articolo sull’Aids o quello su Terminator 2 (il quale ti spinge a chiederti: chissà cosa avrebbe pensato Wallace di fronte a quel colosso di effetti speciali e retorica di Avatar?). Sarà che quando finisci di leggere il libro ti rimane in bocca quell’amaro senso di non più che difficilmente riesci a toglierti di dosso, e che ti assilla tanto da farti vedere le cose negative più grandi di quelle positive. Sarà anche che chiudere con le trascrizioni delle interviste e delle conversazioni non è stata proprio un’idea brillante (in queste il lavoro stilistico di Wallace viene meno trattandosi di riproduzioni del parlato nudo e crudo). Alla fine sei appagato, si è vero, ma ti torna di continuo in testa la sensazione che dare alle stampe questo libro sia stato non tanto un regalo ai lettori italiani di Wallace, quanto piuttosto un regalo alle casse dell’editore.
September 1, 2022
There's nothing particularly wrong with the essays here themselves. Yes, the early ones sometimes take a know-it-all tone, but on a whole, they're well-written and make compelling arguments. So why only three stars? Because I just don't get the feeling that DFW would've had many of these published if he had lived a little longer. While each of these essays pulls a respectable showing, he only gets the magic working with the reverent, breathless "Federer Both Flesh and Not" (Wallace pole A) and the satirical "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open" (Wallace pole B). I also had fun with "Overlooked," which has provided me with a reading list and is the sort of thing I wish Wallace had delved into more often, and "The Nature of Fun."
Elsewhere, he's mostly respectable - it's nice to see him knock Bret Easton Ellis off of his self-appointed perch - but his A game isn't there, which wouldn't be so much of a problem if his A game hadn't been at every piece in both A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Every essay in both of those books has stuck with me, where I'm having trouble remembering much about, say, "Mr. Cogito" or "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama" or "The Best of the Prose Poem" or "Back in New Fire."
Besides, you can tell these are leftovers because Wallace had covered this ground much better in earlier essays. While Borges is probably the best of the illustrious (plus John Fucking Updike) authors Wallace has ever profiled, "Borges on the Couch" has nothing on "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" or "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed" in terms of insight, nor does it match "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think's" humor. And if you want to see DFW get down and talk about film, who you gonna call? "The (As It Were) Seminal Impact of Terminator 2" or "David Lynch Keeps His Head?" Meanwhile, while "Just Asking" is nice and sincere and earnest, it's no "View from Mrs. Thompson's" as 9/11 commentary goes. And as for the heavy philosophy of "Authority and American Usage" or "E Unibus Pluram," forget it.
I'm a DFW nut, so I'm glad I own this, but I can't recommend this to anyone who isn't a DFW nut, whereas I'd recommend the other two essay collections to pretty much everyone. Respectable but inessential, although you can't hold it against Wallace, because I can't see Wallace deeming many of these essays worthy of collection. The Pale King, on the other hand, is your joint as posthumous DFW goes.
Elsewhere, he's mostly respectable - it's nice to see him knock Bret Easton Ellis off of his self-appointed perch - but his A game isn't there, which wouldn't be so much of a problem if his A game hadn't been at every piece in both A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Every essay in both of those books has stuck with me, where I'm having trouble remembering much about, say, "Mr. Cogito" or "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama" or "The Best of the Prose Poem" or "Back in New Fire."
Besides, you can tell these are leftovers because Wallace had covered this ground much better in earlier essays. While Borges is probably the best of the illustrious (plus John Fucking Updike) authors Wallace has ever profiled, "Borges on the Couch" has nothing on "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" or "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed" in terms of insight, nor does it match "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think's" humor. And if you want to see DFW get down and talk about film, who you gonna call? "The (As It Were) Seminal Impact of Terminator 2" or "David Lynch Keeps His Head?" Meanwhile, while "Just Asking" is nice and sincere and earnest, it's no "View from Mrs. Thompson's" as 9/11 commentary goes. And as for the heavy philosophy of "Authority and American Usage" or "E Unibus Pluram," forget it.
I'm a DFW nut, so I'm glad I own this, but I can't recommend this to anyone who isn't a DFW nut, whereas I'd recommend the other two essay collections to pretty much everyone. Respectable but inessential, although you can't hold it against Wallace, because I can't see Wallace deeming many of these essays worthy of collection. The Pale King, on the other hand, is your joint as posthumous DFW goes.
July 20, 2016
my first checkout from the new york public library (*); i went semi-nuts in the fiction section, wondering how the hell i'd missed a DFW publication event, then got home and read it and was totally let down. about halfway through i grew suspicious, and checked the original publication venues for these essays. indeed, the majority are tiny genre rags, and one gets the feeling the David Foster Literary Trust selected titles for inclusion by minimizing copyright fees. the few gems originated in larger media (his Salon piece, "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama", is probably the strongest in the collection). the two longest pieces ("fictional futures and the conspicuously young" and "the empty plenum: david markson's wittgenstein's mistress") are real drudgers, though maybe you'll enjoy the latter if you enjoyed wittgenstein's mistress, in which case you're a monster.
it's pretty hilarious to see DFW shitting on other fiction for writing poorly about math, when infinite jest was marked by its utter nonsense regarding several diversions into mathematics, and let's not even mention the abortion that was everything and more.
(*) moved to manhattan from atlanta in february 2014
it's pretty hilarious to see DFW shitting on other fiction for writing poorly about math, when infinite jest was marked by its utter nonsense regarding several diversions into mathematics, and let's not even mention the abortion that was everything and more.
(*) moved to manhattan from atlanta in february 2014
March 29, 2016
Tiene ensayos muy pesados e insustanciales para mis intereses, pero hay otros que me encantaron de principio a fin. En general, me gustaron. Luego escribo algo más.
April 19, 2021
Di letteratura e di altro
Raccolta di saggi e di interventi di DFW abbastanza disomogenea e che risponde alla solita logica di lucrare su ogni riga scritta dal geniale autore - in ogni caso vale sempre la lettura, anche se è evidente come il livello e il tono dei diversi testi risponde alle diverse esigenze dalle quali sono nate.
Molto interessanti i testi sulla letteratura dove si colgono alcune perle quali: un libro in lavorazione è definito come una specie di bimbetto mostruosamente mutilato , oppure un godibilissimo gioco metaletterario in cui DFW inventa una nuova forma di recensione letteraria "la Recensione Deittica" per ironizzare sulla inutile trasgressività della "Poesia in Prosa" - il Trasgressore Professionista non si accorse che le convenzioni spesso diventano convenzioni proprio grazie alla loro efficacia e utilità .
C'è spazio anche per una riflessione molto USA-centrica sul futuro della letteratura che echeggia in parte la dicotomia Apocalittici ed Integrati di Eco, ma vent'anni dopo e con molta più angoscia da parte di DFW (ma non poteva essere altrimenti) e una trentina di pagine molto specifiche su singoli vocaboli inglesi che starebbero meglio in un testo specialistico (che senso ha, poi, inserirlo in una versione italiana?)
Segnalo anche una profezia del 2007 sulla deriva inarrestabile della autoreferenzialità informativa e culturale in cui (purtroppo) ormai siamo totalmente immersi - cercare davvero di essere informati e colti oggi significa sentirsi quasi sempre stupidi, e aver bisogno di aiuto .
Vi sono poi alcune recensioni varie di libri che, forse, possono interessare in modo limitato, con la notevole eccezione di un saggio fondamentale ed importantissimo che ha contribuito a far conoscere un libro notevolissimo come L'amante di Wittgenstein di David Markson.
Meno interessanti (per me) il testo sul cinema commerciale di Terminator, il paio di interviste e la telefonata con Gus Van Sant che non ha nulla di memorabile - il fatto che ormai si stiano pubblicando le trascrizioni di telefonate è un chiaro segno che stiamo ormai facendo un buco nel barile-DFW, nel quale non c'è più nulla da raschiare, purtroppo.
Raccolta di saggi e di interventi di DFW abbastanza disomogenea e che risponde alla solita logica di lucrare su ogni riga scritta dal geniale autore - in ogni caso vale sempre la lettura, anche se è evidente come il livello e il tono dei diversi testi risponde alle diverse esigenze dalle quali sono nate.
Molto interessanti i testi sulla letteratura dove si colgono alcune perle quali: un libro in lavorazione è definito come una specie di bimbetto mostruosamente mutilato , oppure un godibilissimo gioco metaletterario in cui DFW inventa una nuova forma di recensione letteraria "la Recensione Deittica" per ironizzare sulla inutile trasgressività della "Poesia in Prosa" - il Trasgressore Professionista non si accorse che le convenzioni spesso diventano convenzioni proprio grazie alla loro efficacia e utilità .
C'è spazio anche per una riflessione molto USA-centrica sul futuro della letteratura che echeggia in parte la dicotomia Apocalittici ed Integrati di Eco, ma vent'anni dopo e con molta più angoscia da parte di DFW (ma non poteva essere altrimenti) e una trentina di pagine molto specifiche su singoli vocaboli inglesi che starebbero meglio in un testo specialistico (che senso ha, poi, inserirlo in una versione italiana?)
Segnalo anche una profezia del 2007 sulla deriva inarrestabile della autoreferenzialità informativa e culturale in cui (purtroppo) ormai siamo totalmente immersi - cercare davvero di essere informati e colti oggi significa sentirsi quasi sempre stupidi, e aver bisogno di aiuto .
Vi sono poi alcune recensioni varie di libri che, forse, possono interessare in modo limitato, con la notevole eccezione di un saggio fondamentale ed importantissimo che ha contribuito a far conoscere un libro notevolissimo come L'amante di Wittgenstein di David Markson.
Meno interessanti (per me) il testo sul cinema commerciale di Terminator, il paio di interviste e la telefonata con Gus Van Sant che non ha nulla di memorabile - il fatto che ormai si stiano pubblicando le trascrizioni di telefonate è un chiaro segno che stiamo ormai facendo un buco nel barile-DFW, nel quale non c'è più nulla da raschiare, purtroppo.
April 30, 2013
Cercasi Erede Wallace Disperatamente
Ricordo ancora gli interminabili mesi vuoti che passavano tra una stagione di Lost e l’altra, e ancora sperimento quelli un po’ meno vuoti ma non meno interminabili che passano tra le stagioni di Dexter. Ricordo ancora, e ormai con il sollievo di averli passati indenne e la voglia di fargli una sonora pernacchia, gli infernali mesi che sono seguiti al giorno della mia laurea, e in quelli mi sentivo un po’ come Fantozzi che tornava al lavoro anche da pensionato. Tutti questi periodi di tempo morto e riempito con un’assenza che dovrà essere perenne, avevano una domanda che li rendeva a loro modo inquietanti, e la domanda era: E ora? Be’, >Lost e Dexter si rimpiazzano velocemente con ciò che furba e lesta l’industria dell’Intrattenimento/Distrazione sa trovare, ma cercare di rimpiazzare David Foster Wallace con qualcos’altro o qualcun altro è un po’ come rimpiazzare i pomodori con il ketchup. Però ora è davvero finito tutto, e questo Both Flesh and Not sarà, con ogni probabilità, l’ultimo libro di DFW che potremo sfogliare, leggere, scaffalare, lasciare sul comodino o portare al parco e leggerlo lì. Beninteso: i saggi di BFaN sono/erano tutti disponibili in rete e questo occasionale recensore li aveva già letti tutti molto tempo prima che la Little, Brown & Co. li raccogliesse in questo libro. Mancano alcune recensioni, qualcuna anche interessante, come ad esempio quella del libro di Reynaldo Arenas e quella su Kathy Acker, ma poca roba se paragonata alla “carne” che c’è qui. Rispetto le altre due raccolte di saggi—A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again e Consider the Lobster—qui si ride meno, c’è meno leggerezza e quindi si può capire come mai ad alcuni di questi saggi si è preferito, prima, pubblicarne altri. C’è meno divertimento, ci sono meno battute, mancano i “reportage” di Harper’s e Rolling Stones, però.... però su Both Flesh and Not c’è soprattutto il Not, ciò che non è carne di Wallace, ossia i suoi interessi più profondi e passionali e in qualche modo “toerici”: Wittgenstein(1) la tassonomia dei generi letterari(2), il cinema di genere di Terminator 2, l’uso estetico della lingua, il tennis e in particolar modo Roger Federer e come lo sport può essere un banco di prova per una semiotica della fenomenologia del personaggio narrativo. In questo senso, se A Supposedly Fun Thing... conteneva saggi in qualche modo riconducibili alle trame e gli orditi di Infinite Jest, Both Fles and Not contiene tutti i saggi riconducibili alle trame e orditi che in un certo modo disegnano David Wallace come persona, come individuo costituito (anche) dalle cose che più ha a cuore e che più alberga(va)no nella sua indecifrabile e affascinante mente. Curioso che questo libro, qua in Italia, sarà pubblicato insieme alla traduzione della biografia di D.T. Max. Va be’, io non ho mai nascosto e tantomeno nascondo qua la mia profonda avversione per le biografie (3), ma questa volta è lo stesso DFW che, tra le righe dei saggi qui contenuti, ci fa capire che le biografie e autobiografie/memoir degli autori siano una specie di malattia narcisistica/voyeristica della cultura contemporanea (e qui si trova la stroncatura di una biografia di Borges). Di un autore contano soltanto le opere, e sono quelle che costituiscono la miglior biografia di qualunque scrittore. Ecco: Both Flesh and Not è la vera biografia di David Wallace: un’autobiografia che lui ha scritto involontariamente e inconsapevolmente, dissezionando per noi (alcune del)le sue passioni e condividendo con noi ciò che pensa del mondo, della cultura e della letteratura. L’autobiografia di uno scrittore che nei libri, nei racconti e nei saggi che ha scritto, è riuscito a saldare una poetica, uno stile letterario, un modo di vedere il mondo. Un’etica. Beffardo che l’ultima frase dell’ultimo saggio dell’ultimo libro di David Foster Wallace sia una domanda: “What kind of future does that augure?” Già, appunto: E ora?
(1) In relazione al romanzo Wittgenstein’s Mistress di David Markson—libro che DFW adorava e per buonissime ragioni, e spero che anche qua in Italia, dopo la pubblicazione di questo BFaN la prossima estate, si inizierà finalmente a prendere in considerazione la pubblicazione anche di W’sM del caro vecchio Markson, romanzo che DFW mette nella lista dei suoi “5 direly underappreciated U.S. novel>1960”, insieme a, rullo di tamburi, Blood Meridian di McCarthy (!!!)
(2) Sul quale si veda il notevole “The Best of the Prose Poem,” dove, tra le righe, si mostra come la pratica letteraria possa essere un modo per incentivare l’esercizio della Libertà.
(3) niente di personale, è che mi interessano quanto le opinioni di Valeria Marini sulla meccanica quantistica, o sull’action painting.
Ricordo ancora gli interminabili mesi vuoti che passavano tra una stagione di Lost e l’altra, e ancora sperimento quelli un po’ meno vuoti ma non meno interminabili che passano tra le stagioni di Dexter. Ricordo ancora, e ormai con il sollievo di averli passati indenne e la voglia di fargli una sonora pernacchia, gli infernali mesi che sono seguiti al giorno della mia laurea, e in quelli mi sentivo un po’ come Fantozzi che tornava al lavoro anche da pensionato. Tutti questi periodi di tempo morto e riempito con un’assenza che dovrà essere perenne, avevano una domanda che li rendeva a loro modo inquietanti, e la domanda era: E ora? Be’, >Lost e Dexter si rimpiazzano velocemente con ciò che furba e lesta l’industria dell’Intrattenimento/Distrazione sa trovare, ma cercare di rimpiazzare David Foster Wallace con qualcos’altro o qualcun altro è un po’ come rimpiazzare i pomodori con il ketchup. Però ora è davvero finito tutto, e questo Both Flesh and Not sarà, con ogni probabilità, l’ultimo libro di DFW che potremo sfogliare, leggere, scaffalare, lasciare sul comodino o portare al parco e leggerlo lì. Beninteso: i saggi di BFaN sono/erano tutti disponibili in rete e questo occasionale recensore li aveva già letti tutti molto tempo prima che la Little, Brown & Co. li raccogliesse in questo libro. Mancano alcune recensioni, qualcuna anche interessante, come ad esempio quella del libro di Reynaldo Arenas e quella su Kathy Acker, ma poca roba se paragonata alla “carne” che c’è qui. Rispetto le altre due raccolte di saggi—A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again e Consider the Lobster—qui si ride meno, c’è meno leggerezza e quindi si può capire come mai ad alcuni di questi saggi si è preferito, prima, pubblicarne altri. C’è meno divertimento, ci sono meno battute, mancano i “reportage” di Harper’s e Rolling Stones, però.... però su Both Flesh and Not c’è soprattutto il Not, ciò che non è carne di Wallace, ossia i suoi interessi più profondi e passionali e in qualche modo “toerici”: Wittgenstein(1) la tassonomia dei generi letterari(2), il cinema di genere di Terminator 2, l’uso estetico della lingua, il tennis e in particolar modo Roger Federer e come lo sport può essere un banco di prova per una semiotica della fenomenologia del personaggio narrativo. In questo senso, se A Supposedly Fun Thing... conteneva saggi in qualche modo riconducibili alle trame e gli orditi di Infinite Jest, Both Fles and Not contiene tutti i saggi riconducibili alle trame e orditi che in un certo modo disegnano David Wallace come persona, come individuo costituito (anche) dalle cose che più ha a cuore e che più alberga(va)no nella sua indecifrabile e affascinante mente. Curioso che questo libro, qua in Italia, sarà pubblicato insieme alla traduzione della biografia di D.T. Max. Va be’, io non ho mai nascosto e tantomeno nascondo qua la mia profonda avversione per le biografie (3), ma questa volta è lo stesso DFW che, tra le righe dei saggi qui contenuti, ci fa capire che le biografie e autobiografie/memoir degli autori siano una specie di malattia narcisistica/voyeristica della cultura contemporanea (e qui si trova la stroncatura di una biografia di Borges). Di un autore contano soltanto le opere, e sono quelle che costituiscono la miglior biografia di qualunque scrittore. Ecco: Both Flesh and Not è la vera biografia di David Wallace: un’autobiografia che lui ha scritto involontariamente e inconsapevolmente, dissezionando per noi (alcune del)le sue passioni e condividendo con noi ciò che pensa del mondo, della cultura e della letteratura. L’autobiografia di uno scrittore che nei libri, nei racconti e nei saggi che ha scritto, è riuscito a saldare una poetica, uno stile letterario, un modo di vedere il mondo. Un’etica. Beffardo che l’ultima frase dell’ultimo saggio dell’ultimo libro di David Foster Wallace sia una domanda: “What kind of future does that augure?” Già, appunto: E ora?
(1) In relazione al romanzo Wittgenstein’s Mistress di David Markson—libro che DFW adorava e per buonissime ragioni, e spero che anche qua in Italia, dopo la pubblicazione di questo BFaN la prossima estate, si inizierà finalmente a prendere in considerazione la pubblicazione anche di W’sM del caro vecchio Markson, romanzo che DFW mette nella lista dei suoi “5 direly underappreciated U.S. novel>1960”, insieme a, rullo di tamburi, Blood Meridian di McCarthy (!!!)
(2) Sul quale si veda il notevole “The Best of the Prose Poem,” dove, tra le righe, si mostra come la pratica letteraria possa essere un modo per incentivare l’esercizio della Libertà.
(3) niente di personale, è che mi interessano quanto le opinioni di Valeria Marini sulla meccanica quantistica, o sull’action painting.
Read
May 16, 2025جستار کوتاهی از این کتاب را ترجمه کردم که اینجا در دسترس است:
https://t.me/DFWinFarsi/22
فعلا دیگر کاری با والاس ندارم.
https://t.me/DFWinFarsi/22
فعلا دیگر کاری با والاس ندارم.
March 30, 2014
In some ways, publishing this wasn't fair. Wallace's other non-fiction collections were meticulously curated and show him working at a delirious, fevered intellectual pitch; they also tended to be pieces he had written over the course of a few years in the early 90's or early 2000's. The real problem with Both Flesh and Not is that it extends that chronology all the way back to the 1980's through 2007 with work that, while engaging and funny and often quite insightful, often lacks the really flooring brilliance of his best non-fiction.
In fact several of the pieces in here, especially his literary reviews, come across as the work of a jealously insecure, though deeply erudite mind. It's not enough that he gushes about his love of Wittgenstein's Mistress (which really is phenomenally well done) he also has to write an eye-glazingly protracted piece that makes every conceivable effort to remind you of how thorough and total his own grasp of Wittgenstein/Analytic philosophy is (as though we ever doubted, or even cared). And in a review of 2 thoroughly unimpressive novels about mathematics, he seems interested not only in making it crystal clear that he is a more thoughtful novelist than either of the 2 aforementioned writers, but that he in fact has a much deeper and more profound understanding of higher mathematics than either of them either. In short, Wallace seems to become weirdly passive-aggressive whenever any novelist dares raise their head to write a book about any sort of idea or theme that he himself is personally interested in.
And yet, there are pieces in here that are really gorgeously alive, in particular his essays about Tennis, which are so full of passion and delightful descriptions of Roger Federer, Andre Aggasi, Pete Sampras, et al. in action that they actually made me care about an organized, competitive athletic activity for probably the first time in my life.
However, the later pieces here are hard to read. Not because they recall his impending demise, but simply because they are so heavily rooted in and dependent upon the cultural climate of the late Bush years ("I'm the decider." "Mission Accomplished"… remember when that stuff was in the news)? And the simple fact is that as brilliant and as wide-ranging and as endlessly erudite as David Foster Wallace was, the America of 2014 is by many orders of magnitude more fraught with white noise and anxiety and vast economic woe than even he probably would have imagined if he was still around today. Wallace at his best was a deeply insightful writer and thinker, but 6 years after his death, I think we've already left him behind in the Big American Dread department.
To use a silly pop-music metaphor, Both Flesh and Not is more like a reissue of some huge band's rarities and b-sides rather than a collection of their greatest hits. If you already love Wallace's other books, you will likely love some (though maybe not all) of these essays. If you've never read him or just never made it around to his non-fiction before, this probably isn't the best or strongest place to start from. You'd probably be better served by starting with "Consider the Lobster," or "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never do Again"
In fact several of the pieces in here, especially his literary reviews, come across as the work of a jealously insecure, though deeply erudite mind. It's not enough that he gushes about his love of Wittgenstein's Mistress (which really is phenomenally well done) he also has to write an eye-glazingly protracted piece that makes every conceivable effort to remind you of how thorough and total his own grasp of Wittgenstein/Analytic philosophy is (as though we ever doubted, or even cared). And in a review of 2 thoroughly unimpressive novels about mathematics, he seems interested not only in making it crystal clear that he is a more thoughtful novelist than either of the 2 aforementioned writers, but that he in fact has a much deeper and more profound understanding of higher mathematics than either of them either. In short, Wallace seems to become weirdly passive-aggressive whenever any novelist dares raise their head to write a book about any sort of idea or theme that he himself is personally interested in.
And yet, there are pieces in here that are really gorgeously alive, in particular his essays about Tennis, which are so full of passion and delightful descriptions of Roger Federer, Andre Aggasi, Pete Sampras, et al. in action that they actually made me care about an organized, competitive athletic activity for probably the first time in my life.
However, the later pieces here are hard to read. Not because they recall his impending demise, but simply because they are so heavily rooted in and dependent upon the cultural climate of the late Bush years ("I'm the decider." "Mission Accomplished"… remember when that stuff was in the news)? And the simple fact is that as brilliant and as wide-ranging and as endlessly erudite as David Foster Wallace was, the America of 2014 is by many orders of magnitude more fraught with white noise and anxiety and vast economic woe than even he probably would have imagined if he was still around today. Wallace at his best was a deeply insightful writer and thinker, but 6 years after his death, I think we've already left him behind in the Big American Dread department.
To use a silly pop-music metaphor, Both Flesh and Not is more like a reissue of some huge band's rarities and b-sides rather than a collection of their greatest hits. If you already love Wallace's other books, you will likely love some (though maybe not all) of these essays. If you've never read him or just never made it around to his non-fiction before, this probably isn't the best or strongest place to start from. You'd probably be better served by starting with "Consider the Lobster," or "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never do Again"
January 22, 2016
I’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace, so I was quite pleased when Penguin sent me a collection of his essays entitled Both Flesh and Not. Wallace is the cult author of Infinite Jest (listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die) and also an unfinished novel called The Pale King.
Of course, I was never going to read an essay about Terminator 2 (which is a film I’ve never seen) or the one about Roger Federer (who plays tennis) or about the US Open.
But impressed by this author’s reputation as a wordsmith, I flicked through the Table of Contents to see what I might like to read from this collection.
I chose ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ because the essay explores examples of ‘math’s new cachet’ in the book world and I was familiar with some of the texts Wallace discussed. Written in 2000, the essay is about the emergence of books and film about heroes of the mathematical world, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel (1996) or A Beautiful Mind’ by Sylvia Nasar (1998) which inspired the film starring Russell Crowe. Wallace makes the point that to some extent these books depend on the reader having some understanding about higher maths. In this respect, he says, such books are like other kinds of genre fiction in that they tend to be assessed using evaluative criteria more rhetorical than that used for literary fiction. That is, rather than the critic asking ‘is this piece of fiction good?’ the reviewer of genre fiction asks ‘to whom will this piece of fiction appeal?’
In other words, it’s about the audience rather than the intrinsic qualities of the book. And with ‘mathsy’ books (that’s my word, I just made it up) ‘the precise ways in which they’re not very good, will vary directly with how much the individual reader already knows about the extraordinary field’ being dramatised. Higher maths, he says, is beautiful and interesting, but lots of people are scared off it by how hard it can be at the lower levels that one needs to work through in order to reach the pinnacle.
Well, I’m not about to argue with the likes of David Foster Wallace but I have to say that even though I didn’t understand all the maths and science in Seduced by Logic, by Robyn Arianrhod, I still found it a very interesting book. Of course he could not have read this one because it was published only last year.
But Wallace had also obviously never read Sue Woolfe’s Leaning Towards Infinity (2000) either, (perhaps because books by Australian authors failed to attract his attention), but if he had he would surely have included it in his musings because it was a much better book than Fermat’s Last Theorem, and by the sound of them, the other books he discusses as well.
The publisher has noted that Wallace used to like playing with words and so they have bookended each chapter with vocabulary that he used in the essays, (complete with definitions, of course). In ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ I didn’t actually find any that I had to look up. Just lucky, I guess …
Of course, I was never going to read an essay about Terminator 2 (which is a film I’ve never seen) or the one about Roger Federer (who plays tennis) or about the US Open.
But impressed by this author’s reputation as a wordsmith, I flicked through the Table of Contents to see what I might like to read from this collection.
I chose ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ because the essay explores examples of ‘math’s new cachet’ in the book world and I was familiar with some of the texts Wallace discussed. Written in 2000, the essay is about the emergence of books and film about heroes of the mathematical world, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel (1996) or A Beautiful Mind’ by Sylvia Nasar (1998) which inspired the film starring Russell Crowe. Wallace makes the point that to some extent these books depend on the reader having some understanding about higher maths. In this respect, he says, such books are like other kinds of genre fiction in that they tend to be assessed using evaluative criteria more rhetorical than that used for literary fiction. That is, rather than the critic asking ‘is this piece of fiction good?’ the reviewer of genre fiction asks ‘to whom will this piece of fiction appeal?’
In other words, it’s about the audience rather than the intrinsic qualities of the book. And with ‘mathsy’ books (that’s my word, I just made it up) ‘the precise ways in which they’re not very good, will vary directly with how much the individual reader already knows about the extraordinary field’ being dramatised. Higher maths, he says, is beautiful and interesting, but lots of people are scared off it by how hard it can be at the lower levels that one needs to work through in order to reach the pinnacle.
Well, I’m not about to argue with the likes of David Foster Wallace but I have to say that even though I didn’t understand all the maths and science in Seduced by Logic, by Robyn Arianrhod, I still found it a very interesting book. Of course he could not have read this one because it was published only last year.
But Wallace had also obviously never read Sue Woolfe’s Leaning Towards Infinity (2000) either, (perhaps because books by Australian authors failed to attract his attention), but if he had he would surely have included it in his musings because it was a much better book than Fermat’s Last Theorem, and by the sound of them, the other books he discusses as well.
The publisher has noted that Wallace used to like playing with words and so they have bookended each chapter with vocabulary that he used in the essays, (complete with definitions, of course). In ‘Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama’ I didn’t actually find any that I had to look up. Just lucky, I guess …
Displaying 1 - 30 of 681 reviews