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The Pale King
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Monday, 14 March 2011 |
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General spolier warning: As reviews appear I will make every attempt to avoid spoilers appearing on the front page of the Fantods. If you don't want to know anything, don't follow the links... Jonathan Segura has a review of The Pale King up over at Publishers Weekly (reasonably heavy spoilers). In response to the review, Nina Shen Rastogi from Brow Beat over at Slate.com writes (including minor spoilers): The verdict? The Pale King isn't "the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction." But parts of it are "nothing short of sublime," others are "pants-pissingly hilarious," and the chapters that center on [spoilers] are "tiny masterpieces of that whole self-aware po-mo thing of his that's so heavily imitated." Even in its incomplete state, reviewer Jonathan Segura notes, "the book is unmistakably a David Foster Wallace affair."
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Conferences
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Wednesday, 02 March 2011 |
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Update: It's on today, wish I could be there.
Something I posted on the twitter feed but only just found the note to myself to post here... David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel _Infinite Jest_ imagines a not-too-distant future in which the equivalents of Hulu and Netflix streaming kill the advertising business to such an extent that the government decides to save the economy with 'sponsored time': hence, a great deal of the novel's action takes place in the 'Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment'. The book is deeply (if hilariously) pessimistic about people's chances of connecting with one another in a culture built on one-way media consumption -- this pessimism, of course, is represented most baldly by The Entertainment, a technology-enhanced movie so entertaining that anyone who once sees it becomes incapable of doing anything other than watching it over and over again. This panel will, broadly speaking, address the question of whether David Foster Wallace was or would have been a Clay Shirky fan. In other words, would (did) Wallace believe that the Internet is better for us than TV because we are active participants in the creation of Internet content? Why are the digerati enamored of _Infinite Jest_, and what can the book tell us about the Internet's potential to help or hinder human connection?
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General Updates
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Thursday, 10 March 2011 |
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DFW is categorically, unquestionably, miraculously the best writer of the past twenty, fifty, one hundred, maybe forever years. According to me, that is, because I will not speak for anyone else, not on this type of subject matter. He is the first writer I’ve seriously considered the great full stop of my lifelong reading expedition, the ‘The End’ of my reading career: that I could never seek to read any other author after now because DFW writings unaccompanied could satiate me until I shuffle off this etc. But in saying this, of course, reading DFW is also the opposite of an ending, as the first experience of his work is a kind of new-seeing, a strain of becoming, some form of upheavally beginning, some type of newbornish opening up of the world. DFW grants me pleasure and fulfilment that I have not hit upon in other parts of my life—and my life is a very high-quality life—but he also inspires in me discontent and restlessness, so that I want to dash out and read every single word ever written about every single topic, ever. Furthermore, every subterranean answer he offers in his work is wrapped in layers of questions, like that children’s birthday party game Pass-the-Parcel whereby a prize is wrapped in layers of paper. Within DFW’s writing you can unwrap deep enough time and time again to find yourself another prize, a treat of some nuggetty nucleus of real truth, and during the unwrapping process you’ll glance just over there and see in other rooms of the party more games of Pass-the-Parcel are taking place, an almost-infinite amount of rooms and games really (a labyrinthine children’s birthday party, what a thought), where there are an almost-infinite number more truths to be uncovered. It’s a bind, alright, but the best class of bind, like feathered handcuffs.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 08 March 2011 |
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Update: Matt Bucher's quote has been corrected. Good stuff. It's interesting to see how these things play out... I was interviewed by David Freedlander this weekend past for his article, Dead Author Breeds Big Business: The David Foster Wallace Industry. It documents the rise of the 'David Foster Wallace Industry' with good breadth of commentary. But after reading some of the quotes and passages in the article I'm left wondering about its intentions and what I can only read as spin to make the 'industy' look like a negative thing. There's nothing in there concerning the comments I made about loving reading the criticism in Consider David Foster Wallace; nothing in there about my explicit reference to the quality of the essays supporting the Fate, Time and Language publication. But this stuff gets me cranky: Some grumbling about exploitation has been heard from the Fantods, especially when the work is widely available on the Internet, like when the Kenyon speech that became This Is Water becomes copyrighted and available for $14.99 by the checkout desk of the local bookstore. "Clearly, anything else published under his name will be just scraping money out of his coffin," Mr. Bucher said. I'm focusing on the bold text here: David Freedlander asked me about grumblings in response to things like the publication of This Is Water. I agreed I'd read things like that on the web. He asked if that was on the fantods. I was quite clear in clarifying that I'd read things like that elsewhere, not on the Fantods. In fact, I think I'm one of the few people who didn't have anything explicitly bad to say about This is Water - I kind of liked it (and I copped flack for that in private...). If we change the word 'from' to 'by' then it would be considerably more representative of my response: ...grumbling about exploitation has been heard from the Fantods... VS ...grumbling about exploitation has been heard by the Fantods... [And just for clarification's sake. This site got the name 'The Howling Fantods' because it stuck with me after I first read Infinite Jest. I know DFW didn't coin the phrase, but for me, it is synonymous with reading that novel. There was zero intention to have the fan in 'Fantods' represent David Foster Wallace fans. I now realise that many people think that, and I feel silly for not seeing that connection could be made in the first place!] But I'm really quite angry about the positioning and context of Matt Bucher's 'quote' directly after. "Clearly, anything else published under his name will be just scraping money out of his coffin," Mr. Bucher said. Matt Bucher is my friend and his love for everything David Foster Wallace is clear to anyone who knows him. He maintains the massive wallace-l mailing list, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Sideshow Media Group Press that was responsible for the publication of Elegant Complexity and Consider David Foster Wallace, and he is an advocate for the work of David Foster Wallace whenever he can, check out SXSW this weekend. You might like to check out his posts about The Pale King over at his blog Simple Ranger while you're at it. Matt has responded in the comment section of David Freedlander's article writing: For the record, I don't believe anything else published under DFW's name would be "scraping money from his coffin." That's what *some* people believe or might believe. I was describing the haters, the critics, not myself. That's quite a significant shift in context, no?
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General Updates
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Tuesday, 08 March 2011 |
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Today over at The Rumpus Tori Schacht: The Last Book I Loved, The Broom of the System: David Foster Wallace was a writer with whom I was determined, out of principle, not to fall in love. The hype! The fandom! All that geeking out! The angsty 18-year old girls with severe haircuts and ironic t-shirts toting around Infinite Jest like the goddamned Rosetta Stone! The whole thing smacked of hipsterism and zeitgeist in a way that I wanted to distance myself from. No, sir! No 1,000-plus page schizoid novel for this reader; I’ll take Proust for $800, Alex. Besides, he couldn’t be worth his salt—this multiple-named longhaired dude whom I occasionally mixed up with Jonathan Franzen. But after my boyfriend finished Infinite Jest, rapturous and feverishly babbling about acronyms, I took a stab at it and fell hard—fell flat on my face in the way that feels like heaven when you’re crazy in love and running through a pine forest at dusk somewhere in New England. It was probably the only novel I’ve ever read that got me out of my depth in terrifying ways, but all the same left me laughing for full hours at a time— the only novel that altered my entire perception of what comic writing can do. To this day, I can’t say I’ve downright missed, longed for a novel the way I yearn for Infinite Jest. This is exactly why I was so fearful of picking up the earlier-published The Broom of the System; it’s the only other novel Wallace wrote (forthcoming Pale King aside). While I was hungry to be in his thrall once more, in some ways, the journey would end here.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 08 March 2011 |
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Personally I veer on the optimist side. I think anyone who thinks that it will be the first 400 pages of an uncompleted 1,200 page book are ignoring the work methods of authors like Wallace, who confessed to Amherst Magazine I am a Five Draft man. I actually learned this at Amherst, in William Kennick's Philosophy 17 and 18, with their brutal paper-every-two-weeks schedules. I got down a little system of writing and two rewrites and two typed drafts. I've used it ever since. I like it. From the descriptions of his agonising rewrites of everything, I find it very hard to believe that in 7 or 8 years of full-time writing on a project, he hadn't completed at the very least a first draft. Zadie Smith may write from A to Z, but Wallace never has. It's not going to be like "the story just ends" in the middle of a scene where Lane Dean Jr. is professing his love for Bella Swan but knows they can never be together because not only is he a vampire but he is also completely fictional. Rather, I believe it'll be a complete novel with some sections more revised than others. The absolute worst case scenario I can imagine is that he's described gaps in the narrative the way he did in Adult World II from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, [...]
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The Pale King
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Monday, 07 March 2011 |
The final look of the US (Karen Green) and UK (John Gray) editions of The Pale King. Not long now!
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 05 March 2011 |
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I'm both excited and feeling trepidation about the release of The Pale King. But I think I'm a bit more hopeful than some others and I'll try to explore why I think this is below. WARNING: There are possible spoilers about The Pale King if you've been trying to avoid reading anything about it.
[Continue reading after the break by clicking read more below]
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Critical Analysis
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Sunday, 27 February 2011 |
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Update: From the review: [...] To get a handle on the modern experience of doubt, and to strengthen their claim that this is a serious problem, the authors turn to David Foster Wallace (“greatest writer of his generation”) and Elizabeth Gilbert (reigning “chick lit queen”). They chose these two for three principal reasons: - Both writers’ work has obviously resonated within the culture;
- Both have openly reckoned with the existential doubt Dreyfus and Kelly are concerned with; and
- Both claim to understand the writer’s task as showing the way out from our current entropic darkness to the light of a renewed sense of meaning.
On #3, it’s quite clear that in this task, Wallace, at least, failed spectacularly. The authors’ gambit though, is that we can learn something from the way that he failed. This is a risky line of inquiry, considering where it took “perhaps the greatest mind [of his generation] altogether.” A reader might reasonably ask themselves if they want to join the authors in this investigation. Why did I answer in the affirmative? Because of the humility and capacity for delight I mentioned above—wherever Wallace’s trail took him, Dreyfus survived. So where did Wallace take him? As the authors understand him, Wallace sees the problem as being not only that we don’t know how to live meaningful lives, but that we can’t even focus long enough to really grasp the question. We’re distracted by the specter of a happiness resulting from “perfect entertainment.” We’re drawn to pursue this happiness, but while we might recognize that the pursuit “eviscerates” us, the promise of perfection is impossible to resist. Sounds like the addict, no? Assuming he’s right, and we’re all hopelessly addicted to the pursuit of this perfect distraction, being eviscerated is a given, and is therefore what we have to learn to deal with. But what does this evisceration look like? Crippling anxiety from which the only refuge is a torturous boring world of senseless, relentless banality (boring especially in contrast to the imagined utopia of the perfect distraction). So how do we deal with the choice between crippling anxiety and tortuous boredom? [...]
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The Pale King
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Monday, 28 February 2011 |
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Update: @georgelazenby had a similar idea today! You can check out tracked changes of all the differences over at 454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157. Previously: With the publication of The Pale King excerpt 'Backbone' in the New Yorker I thought I'd go back to DFW's Lannan reading and look at some of the additions and/or changes. Substantial Additions: -An additional couple of paragraphs early on about Dr Kathy beginning "Thus was Dr. Kathy[...]".
-A paragraph about the boy's treatment at school, "At his elementary school, where his behaviour was exemplary[...]".
-A new paragraph about Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann (supporting the passage about the Bengali holy man which itself has been moved further along in the text from the Lannan reading) beginning, "Four separate
licensed, bonded physicians[...]".
-Two paragraphs about human pain, "Studies of human algesia[...]".
-And a substantial section that makes up the final third of the piece about the boy's father, his maxims and his affairs. There are also numerous little additions and changes but a couple that
stood out to me: Lannan: The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of the
circumlabial hypertrophy's effects on the circumoral musculature,
looked unusual also—both rigid and overbroad, and somehow, in one
Social Studies teacher's evaluative phrase, "age inappropriate." New Yorker: The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of
the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature,
looked unusual also—rigid and overbroad and seeming, in one
custodian’s evaluative phrase, “like nothing in this round world.”
and
Lannan: Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy decided to
devote himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every
square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of
the objective as an achievement in the conventional sense. He did not
read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhorters. Certainly it was no
kind of stunt, nor any sort of self-evection; this is verified. The
boy had no conscious wish to 'transcend' anything. If someone had
asked him, the boy would have said only that he’d decided he wanted to
press his lips to every last square micrometre of his own individual
body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Conceits or
conceptions of his own physical “inaccessibility” to himself (as we
are all of us inaccessible to ourselves and can, for example, press
our lips to parts of one another which we cannot begin even to
approach, lip wise, on ourselves) or of the boy's complete
determination apparently to pierce that veil of inaccessibility—to be
in some idiosyncratic way self-contained and -sufficient, fully
available to himself - these were beyond the range of his
consciousness. He was only a child. New Yorker: Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had
devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every
square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of
the goal as an “achievement” in any conventional sense. Unlike his
father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the
McWhirters—certainly it was no kind of stunt. Nor any sort of
self-evection; this is verified—the boy had no conscious wish to
“transcend” anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have
said only that he’d decided he wanted to press his lips to every last
micrometre of his own individual body. He would not have been able to
say more than this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical
“inaccessibility” to himself (as we are all of us self-inaccessible
and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways that we could
not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete
determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibility—to
be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficient—these were
beyond his conscious awareness. He was, after all, just a little boy.
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