Happy 50th Birthday, David Foster Wallace!



David Foster Wallace would've turned 50 today.

The man just gets better with age. Three or four of us have been reading Infinite Jest and discussing their first experience with it in the Infinite Jesters group in LibraryThing.  I'm tagging along, re-reading sections of my favorite tome in tandem with whatever vignette from the book comes up in the occasional discussion.  The book still resonates as deeply with me today as it did eleven years ago when I first read it, that magical time of awe and wonder in my reading life when the very experience of reading itself was forever altered, amped up eleven thousand notches, elevated to an entirely heretofore unknown, unique and unexpected level of challenge and intensity that I'd never even remotely encountered or could have possibly envisioned before in a novel ....  I guess what I wrote a couple years ago remains true for me today: I'm Still Obsessed with Infinite Jest.

Comments

  1. Stayed up late watching various DFW interviews on YouTube. What a mind! What a loss.

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  2. I can't do Infinite Jest any more. Reads like a suicide note in too many ways. Broom, stories, still readable -- haven't tried the new one yet. Reading Moby Dick, though, you see the influence. He was definitely in the Melville line.

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  3. Thought of you today. Infinite Jest still sits on my shelf, mocking me. I was about 75 or so pages into it before decided I just wasn't ready for it. Maybe some day soon.

    Yet I've read enough of him (and yes, watched his interviews on Youtube) to know what we lost.

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  4. My favorite clip, Bubba, maybe you saw it, is the one when he's being interviewed in Italy, and there's J. Franzen, Zadie Smith, and J. Eugenides there with him in the audience, and you see them later together at an outside table sitting down to dinner, sipping wine.

    A rarified line of authors I'd say, Sam. But c'mon, man, you know as well I as I do that DFW was nothing more than a Pynchon clone right? Right?!!! That's an intriguing take on IJ: a suicide note written 13-15 years before the fact! I think I know what you're saying, though. It is laden w/a lot of doom ....

    Theatrica! Don't let the Jest mock you like that! Even if you only read 5 pages a day, it'll only take about two years to finish, there's really nothing foreboding about this book at all. Honest!

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  5. The Pynchon influence runs deep, but those footnotes were inspired by Melville and the high-fallutin Frenchie deconstructionists. I don't think Dave was as excited about linguistics and science stuff as Pynchon, but he was much more excited about Philosophy.

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  6. I never knew about the Melville connection to the footnotes until reading about it either in your blog or ... someplace else.

    You really think Dave wasn't as excited about linguistics even given the extravagantly maximalist way he wrote? I totally agree re. the Philosophy. Have you read Fate, Time and Language his philosophy thesis? I picked it up in the bookstore the other day, read the first paragraph, and put it down the way I put down the book he wrote on infinity, Everything and More. Way over my head or "expertise".

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  7. I have read and forgotten that one; that's right, language was in there. My comment there was more that I can't imagine Dave writing something like Mason Dixon, with its meticulous attention to localized and historical diction. He did have an interest in linguistic philosophy, though, didn't he?

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