Completists' Club discussion

DFW Books

Novels
The Broom of the System (1987)
Infinite Jest (1996)
The Pale King (2011) [Paperback with extra chapters]

Short story collections
Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
Oblivion: Stories (2004)
Uncollected Fiction (20??)

Non-fiction
Signifying Rappers (1990)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
Consider the Lobster (2005)
This is Water (2009)
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2010)
Both Flesh and Not (2012)

Interviews
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (2010)
Conversations with David Foster Wallace (2012)
The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2012)

Secondary Materials (for when you gets around to it)
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (2003)
Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003)
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (2012)
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012)
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012)
A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (2013)


For additional, non-book material see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fo...
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/...
http://theknowe.net/dfw

Signifying Rappers may come back into print. I'm weary of completing the DFW canon since this includes his math book and his philosophy thesis, which I don't ever see myself slogging through.

MJ wrote: "Signifying Rappers may come back into print. I'm weary of completing the DFW canon since this includes his math book and his philosophy thesis, which I don't ever see myself slogging through."

Skip the philo piece. The Math book has some skim-worth writing, DFW riffing. I made it about half-way before I totally started losing the thread. But, yes, perhaps a dozen or 13 paragraphs in there that won't be wince-producing.

Skimming? Skipping? This is not completist talk . . .

I demand an itemized list to back up your claim. (and to alert me to anything weird I've been overlooking.)

The more and more Infinite Jest fades into my memory as one of the best things I've read, the more I think I don't necessarily want to read all the rest of his work (essays, short stories and everything else). Even reading his essays seems to rob some of the specialness of my IJ reading experience because you see him developing the style of the book in other areas. It's kind of a ignorance justification (bad argument) but I want to keep the book as untainted by other material as I can.

Nate wrote: "I demand an itemized list to back up your claim. (and to alert me to anything weird I've been overlooking.)"

Err, uh, Everything existent in book form? It doesn't strike me as there being anything weird. Indeed, a fairly short list:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/...

Stephen--stop that whinging! Take, read. All of it! It all makes IJ better for when you return to it.

I also have not read Signifying Rappers, but have read everything else. For true completists, this website is indispensable as well:

The Uncollected DFW

I enjoyed this litcrit book covering Broom, Girl, IJ and Hideous Men -- part of an "Understanding ____________" series:

Understanding David Foster Wallace

I agreed with its thesis that DFW represents a sort of bridge between postmodern tradition and something new and yet-to-be-properly-named ('post-post-modernism' is a clumsy term that's been tossed about).

And for one more tidbit, this is DFW's first published piece of writing, from the Amherst Review:

The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing

Yeah, but did MFSO send you the ORIGINAL THESIS, hunh? 'cause I got that.

....have not read it yet, tho.

IHHSISLIFWGTU

MJ wrote: "Signifying Rappers may come back into print."

Shit man, they printed new drafts in the Pale King paperback and that commencement speech, we'll probably see those dopey poems he wrote as a kid about the Viking and his mother next. Inventions of the Infinite Hare.

MJ wrote: "I'm weary of completing the DFW canon since this includes his math book and his philosophy thesis"

FWIW I gave the math book to my spousal overunit, who taught himself calculus at thirteen and was a math major before he switched over to philosophy &c &c, and he read about two chapters and said something like "I am handing this back to you before I throw it across the room."

I mean, I read Bill Bryson FFS, so it's not like I put facts before 'a fancy prose style,' but that was....maybe disappointing. Sorta.

Signifying might be here but I can't get at it. http://archive.org/details/signifying...

The Uncollected DFW: coming to a barrel-scraping hardback near you, circa 2015.

His book reviews are worth checking out. They're included in the aforementioned "The Uncollected DFW" link.

MJ wrote: "The Uncollected DFW: coming to a barrel-scraping hardback near you, circa 2015."

I want his LETTERS. A nice juicy selection of 'em, too. But that might take ten years at least, depending on just how juicy some of them are.

His review of Wittgenstein's Mistress is pretty damned great. I'm just sayin'.

A fair amount of the "Uncollected" is already slated for the Both Flesh and Not collection, I believe.

But yes, point taken, Little Brown is in the business of capitalizing off of every scrap. Just look at the packaging of This Is Water for immediate example.

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio wrote: "A fair amount of the "Uncollected" is already slated for the Both Flesh and Not collection, I believe."

Is the TOC out?

Sorry, TOC? Not sure what that is.

Aha, Amazon has it -

Federer Both Flesh and Not
Fictional Futures
The Empty Plenum
Mr Cogito
Democracy and Commerce
Back in New Fire
Terminator 2
The Nature of the Fun
Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated (wow that is scraping, that's what, 2-3 pp long?)
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama
Best of the Prose Poem
Twenty-Four Word Notes
Borges on the Couch
Deciderization 2007
Just Asking

and that's it.

Ah yes, Table of Contents. My bad.

I like his book reviews. I read the Ballard one yesterday.

The Five Direly Underappreciated is no more than a single page. It's basically a laundry list of five books. His entire take on Blood Meridian is "Don't even ask."

http://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/

Why no book reviews? Why are they only selectively choosing from the non-fic backlog? Grr!

MJ wrote: "Why no book reviews? Why are they only selectively choosing from the non-fic backlog? Grr!"

"The Empty Plenum" is his review of Wittgenstein's Mistress and "Borges on the Couch" is a review of a biography of Borges. Also, "Best of the Prose Poem" is a book review.

And "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama" is also a book review.

But wouldn't it be better to include them all?

If I may veer back on topic, The Broom of the System is the last DFW for me. I'm hoping to fit it in before Flesh and Not so I can dovetail first/most recent books nicely.

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio wrote: "The Five Direly Underappreciated is no more than a single page."

PW says '“Deciderization 2007—A Special Report” (his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007)' - yikes, that's pretty bad.

MJ wrote: "But wouldn't it be better to include them all?

But then they couldn't push out another collection and bank upon it! Duh!

If I may veer back on topic, The Broom of the System is the last [fictional]DFW for me."

That's how it worked out for me as well. I look forward to your take on it even more because of that parallel.

Moira wrote: "PW says '“Deciderization 2007—A Special Report” (his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007)' -..."

It's shameless but that is a really good introduction all the same.

MJ wrote: "But wouldn't it be better to include them all?"

And I'm just letting you know that four of them are, in fact, reviews.

I'd like to see more of his contributions to the Amherst student newspaper. I've read some hilarious biographical tidbits about those, including some sort of op-ed piece about why college kids should turn down their damned loud music, or something along those curmudgeonly lines. Also I've read that he and Mark Costello (friend and co-author of Signifying Rappers) wrote some parodic stuff akin to The Onion.

MJ wrote: "Why no book reviews? Why are they only selectively choosing from the non-fic backlog? Grr!"

He really would be better served by some of the shorter book reviews - the Ballard, Dead Elvis, Acker (the Acker especially has some interesting points on aesthetics vs reader enjoyment) than some of this throwaway crap, like the prose poem thing. This is like one of those things where Updike collected even his answers to Cosmo quiz-type shit, except at least it was Updike's own decision to do that.

I really enjoyed the bit about Terminator and "F/X Porn" when I read a PDF of it years and years ago.

And frankly, we don't need published collection of most of this stuff because they're all available via The Howling Fantods site. The only stuff I'm eager to see are things the site isn't able to track down. Everything else is moot as far as I'm concerned.

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio wrote: "And frankly, we don't need published collection of most of this stuff because they're all available via The Howling Fantods site.

For one thing, websites often do just disappear. Even big, popular ones. For another thing, the Estate might decide to issue a big old DCMA to that site any day now about all that stuff they tracked down (I'm surprised they haven't done so already). And some of us do like to have books, not PDFs or HTML files. It's one thing to have a bunch of scanned files floating around the net. A hardback book, even in today's everything-is-disposable age, is a legacy, and I don't think it's moot to point out that maybe DFW isn't being served well by this.

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio wrote: "Moira wrote: "PW says '“Deciderization 2007—A Special Report” (his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007)' -..."
It's shameless but that is a really good introduction all the same."

And by your own criteria, then it probably shouldn't have been included, since it is widely available in a very popular book that had a huge print run - and is probably still in print -- yup, for eleven bucks. http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Americ...

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio wrote: "I'd like to see more of his contributions to the Amherst student newspaper."

Some of that's here http://theknowe.net/dfw -- the first one is about the loud music complaint. It's not an op-ed piece but a letter responding to one supposedly by someone else also named David. -- Except for the 'Removed due to take down notice from Bonnie Nadell' ones. Oops.

I'll be venturing into his work in December if not sooner.

Aloha wrote: "I'll be venturing into his work in December if not sooner."

Same here, Aloha.

DFW Books left in the Que:

Novels (Done)
The Broom of the System
Infinite Jest
The Pale King

Short story collections (One left)
Girl with Curious Hair
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Oblivion: Stories
Uncollected Fiction (Dec 2013)

Non-fiction (Three Left)
Signifying Rappers
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
Consider the Lobster (2005)
This is Water
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will
Both Flesh and Not

Interviews
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
Conversations with David Foster Wallace
The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Secondary Materials
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace