Will > Recent Status Updates

Finding the style a little clunky (if always exact) and don’t care for the dialogue, which reads like a script with staging directions. Doesn’t really take advantage of itself as a novel. That being said it has some nice swelling moments (bot 21, eg) and is a moves well.

It occurs to me that ‘Madam Psychosis’ is probably a pun off ‘metempsychosis’ and a reference to Ulysses?

The book makes you laugh, and then makes you feel bad for laughing. This interrogation of one’s own laughter is one of the ways, I think, that a joke can be a serious argument.

Makes me think of Nabokov’s ideas about cruel laughter in Kafka and Cervantes, although the connection is still nascent.

Reminds me also of Joyce’s rhetorical use of jokes in Ulysses?

I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on what doesn’t work for me about this book, but here it is: (comment cuz stupid word cap)

using the feather boa to connect Poor Tony across different sections with different narrative voice is cool

Mario’s first remotely romantic experience: brilliant, although I probably feel this bc i find the isolation of both Mario and Millicent relatable… the dialogue is amazing, DFW really captures the talking-past-each-other thing. the section manages somehow to not feel too cruel to either character, or really to make us feel sympathetic to the their experience of cruelty.

It manages somehow to be both really good and really not very good at all….

The section about Fenton the schizophrenic is unbelievable. (It’s also all two sentences.) Must’ve read it 4 or 5 times at first, then I dreamt of it, then i immediately picked up the book and reread it when i awoke.

Wallace’s brand of linguistics parody takes some getting used to, especially his pension for redundancy [eg “the late Dr. James … (now deceased”)] and oxymoron (“and but” appears a lot)

Went to a lecture Chandrasekera gave at Cornell and it was really brilliant, but the novel isn’t really living up.

Not bad by any means, just not quite as good as i expected. A little overdone.

ehh. some clever moments certainly, but kinda getting old.

the whole section 169-193 was just unbearable to read. satire or no just so so embarrassing. not sure if i’ll be able to make it through if that kind trash keeps up. hopefully returns to the literary and political satire i liked at the beginning…

“hating her, I recognized my hateful humanness, and then but hated myself the more […] nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes”

“all praise to Instinct for making worms love other worms”!

Ch12 rocks. Clever, fun, exciting. At times really feels like a slideshow done by an odd child; at others strays into a cadence that feels too elevated (238, 251, 273, 286), but basically convincing. Timing of Rob reveal (272) feels great. Alison has her own imagined visit from the goon squad on 299, which is cool. Desert as pause also cool. Pauses are good topic for book so much about time.

out of characters :(

second-person makes reader feel implicated… cool

chapter 9 rocks. seeing the vision

stylistically alright, formally awesome (maybe in both the old-fashioned literal sense and the male teenage skateboarding sense), content fine but definitely shining moments!

So far style and content are only sorta interesting to me.

Very well written in that it’s easy to read.

Chapter 4, section 2 is fun and clever: starting to see the vision.

cannot stand the book so far: the prose is mediocre, it’s lewd and gratuitous, I can’t care about the characters. Also so romanticized: heavy on the read-too-much-Harry-Potter-erotica-in-high-school vibes, reads like Choi’s smutty fan fiction about how she wanted high-school to go. honestly embarrassing for an adult to have written this. Still early so maybe redeemable but currently i hate it!

Stuff about masturbation is great psychology. Of course her prolonged isolation has made it nonsexual; to her, it’s either spiritual, “… at times I do so [masturbate] almost without being aware of it, actually. At the dunes, perhaps. Just sitting, being lulled by the surf. There is an ebb, is all,” or utile, “I have done it while driving too…”
At least I read driving part as about utility.

Page 250, paragraph 2.

Brutal.

His melancholy so poignant

See comments for reviews of each story

I agree with what I take to be the central point of the Book VI, that violence is always tragic and can never be fully justified. But the image of an innocent slave owner killed by his slaves doesn’t feel like a great way to make this point


That being said the section isn’t totally without merit: the emergence of a revolutionary conscience is cool, ditto the ideas around the pamphlet and its creation of history

Book VI didn’t age as well as the rest of the book; in fact, it aged pretty poorly. That being said, I’m not done with it yet, and I have the impression Bird’s going to save it, as it seems Tom is on the cusp of developing a revolutionary conscious.

“What is the world around us but a great concert-hall, echoing with the music of birds and beasts, of wind, water, and foliage? what but a great gallery of pictures, painted by the hand of Providence? Nature is a painter—Nature is a musician; and her sons can do nothing better than follow her example.” Book V, Ch 3.