new novels and why they suck and whatever

-"perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds" strikes me as a necessary skill of anyone transposing non-verbal sensations into words.

i meant literally saying "some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine" or something like that. it's a small tic but i've noticed other writers, who most definitely don't have perfect pitch, doing that and it seems just a touch bullshitty.

the tic i'd forgotten about (and could really do without) is one that really bugs me in that end section of IJ, the rendering of a lot of stuff that's coming via gately misspelled or spelled phonetically

does he do that anywhere other than IJ? it happens all over the book, as if the character were writing that segment, and it's the only thing that annoys me about it.

vuvuzelas b flat whine amirite xp

surely the "wardine" section is the rubicon for that particular tic, no?

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

xpost - i'm not sure, actually (if he does it anywhere else) - i mean, i think infinite jest is also the only place that he has non-educated narrators or central reflectors going on, you know?

it bugs me more in the last section where Don G only comes through indirectly: in the yrstruly bit the narration is so much closer to speech it doesn't seem so bad: though it still seems dumb, because it's not like Minty would write that way

it doesn't bother me much in the wardine section but that's mainly because i wasn't going to like that section much ever anyway (haha xpost again)

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

word, that was the only part that made me wonder if i should keep going, as in "really, dfw?"

rinse the lemonade (Jordan) wrote this on thread c/d: 'infinite jest' on board I Love Books on 05-Apr-2010

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

ANYTIME i think about writing "in dialect" in a story, i think of that second. and i am chastened.

i spent my lunchbreak complaining about this piece on tumblr: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/123378-infinite-gesturing-james-wood-takes-on-david-foster-wallace/P1

on reflection i should probably have just gotten some lunch

'i meant literally saying "some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine"'
OH! Sorry yeah I thought by "perfect pitch" you meant he was just awesome at it.

'that he can get with one of those sentences that winds in and out of three or four different kinds of diction, from high-academe philosopher to burnout.'
I feel though this is a generically useful skill (though one I tend to see more from stand-up comics).

'like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.)'
Is he doing that for clarity, or for impact like a rapper would strategically place a pun?

(strongo, are you writing fiction these days?)

(thomp, what's yr tumblr?)

like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.)'
Is he doing that for clarity, or for impact like a rapper would strategically place a pun?

― Philip Nunez

mm i dunno. here's a sentence that jumped out at me as amazing, last time through, which is also a very DFW sentence:

"Mrs. Avril Incandenza isn't crazy about the idea of Hal drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk, when alive, and reportedly his father's own father before him, in AZ and CA; but Hal's academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the junior circuit, make it clear that he's able to handle whatever modest amounts she's pretty sure he consumes -- there's no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and athletic levels, the E.T.A. psych-counselor Dr. Rusk assures her, especially the high-level-athletic part -- and Avril feels it's important that a concerned but un-smothering single parent know when to let go somewhat and let the two high-functioning of her three sons make their own possible mistakes and learn from their own valid experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her own gizzard out, the mother's."

(jordan i am 'timocraticyouth'. are you on there?)

oh ok I think I can see the justification for clarifying that avril is thinking in abstract mother's gizzards rather than her own personal gizzard.

kinda sad this thread has devolved into DFW sentence analysis tbh

I enjoy reading what people have to say about wallace but cosign w/shakey mo, this thread was going in some interesting places (tho I was bummed when it looked like its main subject was gonna be oscar wao)

strongo has always been writing fiction, he's just been taking it more seriously over the last few years, much to the detriment of his free time (and also his hopes and dreams).

wtg strongo

yes excellent

awesome. would very much like to read strongo fiction. (would also like to see strongo fiction published under name "strongo," so book cover says, e.g., "THE CHIROPODIST'S NEPHEW ... by STRONGO.")

(haha btw it would not be an "accusation" to point out that, like ... yeah, I started reading a bunch of DFW in college and really liked it, and part of what I responded to about it was that I really related to the language and thought patterns, in terms of my own (this seems like a big line with him, where some people read it and find the thought patterns familiar/mimetic and interesting, whereas others find them trying and sometimes horrifying) -- and like yes, I think I absorbed some habits from there! which I would avoid using carelessly in paid writing, or anything, but if I'm tossing together an ILX post and my brain goes there first, whatev)

(maybe some of it is just MID-ILLINOIS)

So I started reading The Ask around heady draughts of Bleak House. Nice, er, balance. I've laughed out loud a few times, but his tone is of the kind that creeps into my own fiction and mangles it.

it can be sort of suffocatingly bleak and negative. as i imagine hanging out with milo would be.

(btw, also worth mentioning that a lot of "Wallace" things are kinda extensions on "Barth" things)

wau, have read a lot of both D-Wal and J-Bar and see them as drastically different, except I guess insofar as both are funny and prolix.

oh, I'm just talking minor sentence tics, like the thing with clarifying subjects mentioned above

ehhhh, the wide-scale parodic stuff in Infinite Jest owes a lottttt to barth's brick-size efforts, i think? but it's deployed very differently.

barth for sure. and pynchon too. the endnote thing comes from jack vance

the science fiction/ellery queen jack vance??

that guy yeah. he wrote a lot of weird allegorical made-up world shit and would explain in footnotes the bizarre things he invented to decorate those worlds. they're not endnotes like in infinite jest but the diegetic purpose is identical. afaik he's the first american writer to make so much use of that device and it's hard to imagine a guy as erudite as dfw not being aware of him

it's possible but i always figured the footnotes were a hangover from too many years in academia

The more I keep reading this DFW book, the more I'm struck by how similar his style is to Nabisco's. Both are capable of writing these long, lucid analyses of something but in this really colloquial way, marked by frequent usage of words like "weird" and "stuff."

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), March 23rd, 2006 12:23 PM.

(This book = probably Consider the Lobster.)

strongo probably that has a lot to do with it

the spec-fic conceits of 'infinite jest' are pretty reminiscent of philip k. dick and jack vance style satire, the great concavity/convexity etc. those pulpy sci fi touches get left out of a lot of otherwise spot on appreciation for how well wallace walks the high-low divide like pynchon before him

I've always felt bad for Nicholson Baker, who never seems to get credit for prominently using footnotes in literary fiction as early as 1988 -- several years before DFW started using them.

what about Pale Fire?

for sure that's gotta be a major influence. difference is in 'pale fire' kinbote explicates shade's poem while in 'infinite jest' the commentary occurs on the whole diegetic milieu, as the narrative unravels, a la vance

"some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine" or something like that. it's a small tic but i've noticed other writers, who most definitely don't have perfect pitch, doing that and it seems just a touch bullshitty.

this complaint reminds me of certain sections of richard ford novels where frank bascombe talks about, like, the genus of field mouse that's scampering along the shoulder of whatever road he's driving on. it lends this rich texture to the writing and embeds you in the place and helps build the impression of a complex natural history of new jersey but at the same time i'm like frank, i know you, and you don't know your field mice that well

In Pale Fire the footnotes are used as they would be in a Norton Anthology -- the only place for another voice to interject. Whereas in DFW and Baker, they're often part of the same narrative voice, just made more discursive.

Yeah, there are distinctions. What he attempts in Human Smoke reminds me of what Martin Amis did in Experience.

are there canonical lists of what are thought to be the best books of the past decade or so? i need to read more.

ILX BOOKS OF THE 2000s

ILX BOOKS OF THE 00s: THE RESULTS! (or: Ismael compiles his reading list, 2010-2019)

I haven't read it in years, but didn't Tolkien use footnotes to flesh out the Lord Of The Rings? Or was it just appendices?

appendices

Yes, Return of the King appendices. As a child I was dreadfully disappointed, but it beats the slo-mo rubbish of the films. Alexander Pope's Dunciad full of early footnote fun.

I don't know how I've missed David Mitchell in recent years. Here's James Wood's review of his latest.

i just read 'ghostwritten' yesterday! there's this bit where an 18-year-old kid describes the sound of various jazz records that was so beautiful I had to stop reading for a while.

I've only read Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, but they're both great.

Mitchell is excellent. Just got his new book yesterday, excited to start it.

read this kinda lol response to wood's review the other day

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/06/james-wood-vulgarian.html

interesting link abt his treatment of Bolano @ "domesticator"