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I haven't read any books by David Foster Wallace, though every time he comes up I feel obliged to share a fantastic speech of his about finding joy in the monotony of life. I heard it years ago and it's always stuck with me. Video[1], transcript[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
[2] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david...
A great speech but this is the first I hear it interpreted as an ode to monotony. I've always thought of it as an essay on the value of questioning our default way of thinking in the day-to-day, on the implicit biases we carry with us into the world and how they can trap us in loneliness.
Not ashamed to say I've cried more than once listening to it. It's a lifesaver.
The Pale King, his last novel (unfinished at the time of his death) is a really gorgeous elaboration on the same topics as This Is Water. It is not so much about rejecting the day to day monotony of the modern world, but rejecting the default reaction to the monotony of the modern world. We have complete control over our reaction, and almost none over the reality. One line I’ll paraphrase that sticks with me still: “In the modern world, if you can bear extreme boredom, there is literally nothing you can’t accomplish.”
The general theme is that regardless of the monotonous reality, there’s still plenty of beauty and intrigue to find within it if you look closely enough.
To make this point, The Pale King is about an IRS agent and it includes long, meditative descriptions of turning the pages of extremely long tax forms. I don’t know what philosophical ideas DFW ran into explicitly, i.e. whether he was reframing or actually deriving them, but he was absolutely rubbing up against what we now call mindfulness.
Edit to add one of my favorite scenes in literature ever, with no spoiler or even narrative substance: There's a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one party becomes so engrossed by the conversation that he begins to literally levitate out of his chair. I find this such a simple description of a truly profound experience (~~flow state).
This excerpt from The Pale King is powerful and I recommend it over the "This is Water" speech, esp for software developers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ
People laugh, and it is a bit funny, but it's also deadly serious.
True heroism receives no ovation. It's just you against the world with no one to see or cheer.
Infinite Jest is feeling more prescient every day ( the titular theme is about media addiction ). Worth the steep climb.
Getting off topic here, but is there a word for the concept of an anti-joke? Along with examples? As in, a joke consists of a setup story, and then there is a lull or pause, enough time for the listener to contemplate what going to happen next. And then the joke teller says something unexpected but somewhat related, and it is funny. There is a moment in the speech that I would classify as sort of the opposite. DFW starts relating about the ugly people sitting in traffic with the large SUVs with religious and patriotic bumper stickers, and the crowd starts cheering and laughing, seemingly agreeing that those "others" deserve mockery. But then there comes the punch line, that maybe the others have some worse hardship like bone cancer, which is definitely not funny. Or stated another way, for a joke, the setup story is neutral, and the after effect is funny. For the anti-joke, the setup is funny, and ends somber, and maybe makes you feel bad for laughing at the beginning? The anti-joke start at about 13:28:
There is definitely the concept of the anti-joke. Anti-humour has the wiki page.
The sadly-late Norm Macdonald was a good proponent.
Fwiw though I watched this after your post and I'd say that's not really the same. I'm not sure what you call this technique in speeches with such a setup but it adds great emotional gravity and is something I see and appreciate a lot in speeches like this (or even shows like The Good Place which is incredible but can't be described further without spoilers).
I have a calendar reminder to read this speech every 3 months. It's one of the few reminders that I actually listen to and don't just ignore.
I want to second this recommendation.
This commencement speech that Wallace gave is deeply moving and thought-provoking to me every time I listen to it -- and I have probably heard it at least 10 times.
I have shared it with others, most of whom have had a very similar reaction to it.
How should one interpret the speech in light of his suicide? [1] He didn't shoot his head which suggests that his mind wasn't a master. Still, it makes me a bit worried that his thoughts could be the structure that made him suffer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death
I love his cruise ship essay.
He's such a smug intellectual brat HOWEVER he's fully self-aware of his personality shortcomings and seems to set his qualms and enjoy himself despite of himself by the end.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
Thanks much for this! First time I have heard this. Now saved for repeats.
Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)
The first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow but ended up finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those later.
Yea, I don't really get the take that it's inaccessible. The footnotes are sometimes annoying, but usually they're hilarious.
I haven't read it in ~10 years but I think it's even more relevant, poignant, and hilarious today as it was then since we're just seeing more and more of his predictions about consumerism and self-image come to life.
I found Gravity's Rainbow more accessible and maybe that's because Infinite Jest was clearly inspired by it. They're both very similar in that you just have to power through the first 150-200 pages and then somehow everything starts making sense.
Okay, I want to discuss a major thing in the book, but it's really spoilery. I don't know if hacker news has a thing for that? I'll ROT-13 it and if anyone wants to respond please do. Again, you shouldn't try to read this if you haven't read the book and dont want to be spoiled:
V'ir arire frra guvf zragvbarq naljurer -- ohg vg frrzf gb zr gung gur npghny vasvavgr wrfg va gur obbx, nxn gur ivqrb gung ulcabgvmrf rirelbar, vf rffragvnyyl whfg na nfze ivqrb naq qsj unq uvf svatre ba gur pbaprcg orsber nfze orpnzr n guvat?
I cannot imagine reading this book and skipping the footnotes.
I think it helps to read summaries or explanations of infinite Jest and not just dig into it. Eventually you get a good mental picture of the entire timeline, the rough details of how the dystopia works and how the story is told in a loop.
"And but so"
If you write like this yourself it's no wonder you'd find it readable. Or in other words I see what you did there.
DFW's early short story "Forever Overhead" gives a sense of his potential and lyricism. [0]
It's one of my favorites.
[0] http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...
The link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find another copy here: https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...
I first stumbled across the Pale King in my local library, and it was indeed enough to get me hooked and read first one of the collected essay books and then Infinite Jest.
Spoiler: don’t read this unless spoiled
But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter.
I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.
And if you've read The Pale King, you can skip Something To Do With Paying Attention.
The content is mostly the same, seems like the release of the latter was a cash grab.
I liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was basically a greatest hits of his best material including a decent chunk of Infinite Jest.
...
Infinite Jest was largely a collection of various scenes, some of them recurring and some not.
Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon. Marathe is a legless French Canadian agent of uncertain allegiance and Steeply is a US agent posing as a female reporter called Helen. Closely following the back-and-forth between the two allows the reader to put together major aspects of the grand narrative of the novel.
My favorite scene was a one-off involving the younger kids (pre-teens) at a tennis academy playing an extraordinarily convoluted and physically intense game called Eschaton (think Risk played with tennis gear). If any particular thing made the 1,000 page slog worthwhile, I would say it had to be that.
The footnotes alone could have made up an entire book.
> My favorite scene […] Eschaton […]
And a band that apparently has some David Foster Wallace fans amongst its members did a music video based on that chapter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI (The Decemberists - "Calamity Song")
> Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon.
The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you will.
The state farm insurance claim passage about the brick layer is great and doesn't depend on the rest of the book.
> “Infinite Jest” transformed private torment into a vast metafictional diagnosis of our entertainment-bedizened cultural condition, and, weirdly, sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed. - http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis...
> I sometimes wish Wallace had never written on irony or given that famous commencement address. Both are unfairly used as a stand-in for his entire ideology. He is in turn praised and totally dismissed by large groups of people who have no idea what his larger project as a writer really was. Also I'm pretty sure that he's made it abundantly clear that he never meant to say irony has no proper place in society, merely that it becomes a crutch and a shield for many who would rather not engage earnestly with the world. - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_han...
https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-da...
Reading this makes me feel quite insecure in my own comprehension of these books. I've read Pale King, Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, and Broom of the System. I liked them all. But I read this article and I don't really understand the majority of it, which makes me think that I also missed a lot of what I was supposed to take from the books. Genuine question, does this make sense to most readers? Do you need to be a literature major to understand this article?
If you watch some interviews with DFW and other similar authors, you may come to the conclusion that nobody really knows what they are talking about and it's usually the ego speaking(including Wallaces).
I think that's the point of much of his works:
> Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves.
While the article makes sense to me, there's plenty of filler that detracts from the point. Wallace's work was writing moral fiction for a generation ahead of his time. Many of the themes in his work are more prevalent and pervasive today than they were at the time he wrote them.
Don't be. I don't think the author of this piece is saying much at all. I think they're doing a nerd thing of trying to insist that DFW had some "clear plan" that he was trying to execute. But I think what's really happening is that the author of the article wants there to be some clear plan instead of the truth that what DFW did with his amazing work defies summary in this way.
I wish I could still love DFW's work the way I used to, but it's colored by [allegations of significant relational abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_...).
From the article.
> Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends...
>...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.
> It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.
The fact that he killed himself colors every bit of his work to me. Whatever people may say about depression being a chemical phenomenon outside of our control, there will always be something perverse to me about learning why not to commit suicide from an author who did.
That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing who the author was.
His more serious journalistic pieces can be read without much reflection on the man himself.
On the politics of language:
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...
I don't get how people can care about things like this. The American Constitution was written by slaveowners, and MLK cheated on his wife. It doesn't make the Constitution worthless nor does it make the I have a Dream speech a fraud. Never meet your heroes.
I mean, he knew he was a piece of shit and killed himself. Sort of an ultimate mea culpa. So maybe we can forgive him enough to enjoy his works.
Yeah I totally agree. It doesn't invalidate his work but it adds quite an ick factor for sure.
To be fair, morality is just aesthetics in a more general context.
Ie : This brush stroke is aesthetic. This deed is moral.
Both boil down to feeling-of-rightness.
But ya, that larger context. Maybe Dave is telling artists to get out of the studio.
Yikes, I had suppressed the memory of a terrible university prof I had who was obsessed with DFW, this instantly took me back.
I too hate when people like things a lot