David Foster Wallace

luka

Well-known member
I like his essays, never read his fiction.

His essay about Federer, for example https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

If luka can praise Barney Ronay to the skies surely he'll concede this is good shit 🔫

Barney Ronay is funny, works on a deliberately small scale, little observations, gentle piss taking, sort of comments your mate would make while you watch the game together on telly. Very human. I can't see the comparison.
 

version

Well-known member
Isn't it possible though that he can be both a bit of an arsehole (especially with women) and at the same time be genuinely sympathetic to people who, like him, are suffering with drug problems and depression? I mean if you think it's cloying then that means you have a problem with his style and that is an aesthetic issue I guess. But even if he doesn't get it across well (which I think he does) then I don't think that makes it not genuinely meant. I mean I think that calling it schtick is maybe unfair even if what you say here is true.

Oh yeah, it's totally possible and I believe it when he's discussing stuff like mental illness and AA, but the general sincerity, the stuff like This is Water, feels a bit off to me.
 

version

Well-known member
His best stuff is his nonfiction, imo, the stuff where he has an external subject to focus on and can't talk about himself too much.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Barney Ronay is funny, works on a deliberately small scale, little observations, gentle piss taking, sort of comments your mate would make while you watch the game together on telly. Very human. I can't see the comparison.

To me it's about making sport, not *more* vivid than it is, but *as* vivid as it is, but in prose. Which I think DFW does. I think this is true of both these writers, because I don't really give a fuck about sport and I'll still read them writing about it. Except Barnay Ronay strikes me as a try hard sometimes, a forehead strainer.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I much prefer reading about sport to watching it.

I suppose because sport is about boredom punctuated with stimulation, and writing is about constant stimulation...

Really, then, I was lying just then - I want it to be *more* vivid than sport, cerebrally speaking.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
So maybe *a* reason you prefer Ronay is you actually watch football on telly, so Ronay is talking to your actual experience of football, whereas DFW is writing about tennis to people who aren't necessarily interested in tennis, pitching it towards the pointy heads.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Can't help noticing someone has recently revived threads about Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, JG Ballard, and Richard Powers. Side bets on the next canonical postmodern novelist to get a thread? My money is on Philip K. Dick. Natural progression from the Wake-McLuhan-psychedelic nexus. If it was up to me, it would be Bret Easton Ellis, who actually has some new material worth commenting on, or Joan Didion.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
His best stuff is his nonfiction, imo, the stuff where he has an external subject to focus on and can't talk about himself too much.

Yeah his essays on the McCain campaign trail and the late 90's porn convention are so funny and heartbreaking at the same time. I mean, all of these writers (DeLillo, Pynchon, DFW, etc.) have souls, just divided, heartbroken, long-suffering ones. Come to think of it, maintaining a balance of funny and heartbroken might be the prerequisite for success as a pomo artist. Or it was the prereq since pomo is dead. It's like The Walking Dead, version. Time to just let go and move on, we're in the zombie apocalypse now and you just have to let go (I can't do my fucking Rick Grimes impersonation anymore I should just end it).
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
You can add as many posts as you like - we're up to post-post-post-post-modernism now (can be written p to the fourth)
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
What comes after postmodernism?


Interesting. If you take a dialectical approach to the question, and employ the vaguest possible definitions of modernism and postmodernism, you could arrive at the synthesis of absolutism and relativism as the answer. Now, what that would look like, I have no idea, and it could be something like gnosis/anamnesis. But I'm working on it, or it is working me over, all the time.
 

version

Well-known member
I've seen the term "metamodernism" bandied about, but I don't know much about it.

In 2010 the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker introduced the term metamodernism [24] as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their article 'Notes on metamodernism' they assert that the 2000s are characterized by the emergence of a sensibility that oscillates between, and must be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies. As examples of the metamodern sensibility Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the 'informed naivety', 'pragmatic idealism' and 'moderate fanaticism' of the various cultural responses to, among others, climate change, the financial crisis, and (geo)political instability.

The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which intends a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I don't know. That doesn't feel like a synthesis. More like a compromise between modernism and postmodernism. I suspect whatever it will be will absolutely annihilate the idea that we were ever modern at all. Like breaking through on DMT or Salvia. You just stare in awe realizing you exist on a very low level of the evolutionary chain. More advanced technology and beings are in, around, beyond us all the time.
 
Once you have read Harold Brodkey you can see where Dave got a lot of his stylistic quirks from. "...Classical Mode" especially
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Doesn't meta originally mean very simply "after"? I thought that what became metaphysics was literally what was in the books Aristotle had on his shelf after physics. Or is that bollocks?
 
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