what are you reading now?

entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
I sorta get what Wallace means with how cynicism can seem a bit easy because it requires no sublelty or nuance. I understand the quote mostly as a point about resisting that temptation. To avoid leaning back into that flat world. To keep the door open for redemption.

Haven't read the book though. The movie didn't really stir any great morbid unrest in me. It was pretty funny though (If it's one of those things where intention is to interrogate why you find it funny, then it's an automatic disqualifier for me).
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
Not saying that writing needs to be a complete high res rendering of all impulse and script of the human condition to be great. That's reducing art to representation.

It can be the lie that makes us realize a deeper truth (where's that quote from?)
 
version

version

Well-known member
craner said:
Just reading that quote Versh posted reminds me how much I dislike Wallace. It's a strong, instinctive, consistent reaction every time he starts chundering on.
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Also for all the criticism Ellis gets for being a misogynist etc because of his books, Wallace, supposed writer of redemptive fiction, was the one stalking and assaulting women irl.
 
version

version

Well-known member
With the Trump stuff, I'm not convinced he's taking some contrarian position for the sake of it. I think he just finds it irritating and he's that self-centered that he sees something irritating him personally as being worse than anything genuinely awful happening to other people.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Corpsey said:
Plenty of unjust, capricious brutality in those stories, for sure
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certainly. tho it's hard to compare as so much of it is supernatural. the whims of fickle gods.

it's why I think more of Juvenal etc. the ancient Greek conception of deities etc is - to my understanding - essentially anthropocentric.

whereas the Roman conception was far more numinous. the oldest Roman gods - before influence by the Greeks - had no actual form. more on the order of forces.

as whatever dwells within Bateman, behind the artifice, is some kind of protean, cthonic force, a formless embodiment of cruelty, malice, what have you
 
version

version

Well-known member
re: Wallace - I don't know how smart he actually was. Apparently a lot of the math in Infinite Jest is wrong, his book on infinity is riddled with errors and his essay on an American usage dictionary is a complete mess.

lithub.com

On David Foster Wallace, Georg Cantor, and Infinity

Few ideas have had a racier history than the idea of infinity. It arose amid ancient paradoxes, proceeded to baffle philosophers for a couple of millennia, and then, by a daring feat of intellect, …
lithub.com lithub.com

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE DEMOLISHED. : languagehat.com

languagehat.com languagehat.com
 
version

version

Well-known member
If he was genuinely trying to write something serious on infinity then this is absolutely scathing...

What Wallace offered, in the end, is a purely literary experience. Regarding the nature of that experience, you may find a clue in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s response to Cantor’s great contribution. The thrill we get from discovering that some infinities are bigger than others, Wittgenstein thought, is just a “schoolboy pleasure.” There is nothing awesome about the theory; it does not describe a world of timeless, transcendent, scarcely conceivable entities; it is really no more than a collection of (finite) tricks of reasoning. One might imagine, Wittgenstein said, that the theory of infinite sets was “created by a satirist as a kind of parody of mathematics.” Wallace, whose satiric gifts were transcendent, might have achieved something considerable after all—a sly send-up of pop technical writing. “A parody of mathematics”: As a description of Cantor’s work on infinity, it is surely unjust. As a description of Wallace’s, it may be taken as a tribute.
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version

version

Well-known member
I've found myself wondering whether any of the other guys in AP are getting up to or fantasising the same stuff as Bateman. He often seems to be considered an outlier because of the reader's knowledge of what's going on inside, but he's also seen as interchangeable with all the other Wall St. guys so it follows that the book could center on any one of them and remain the same.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Ellis definitely seems pretty awful - egotistical, grasping, etc - but at a relatively low level, not enough to put me off his art

as it would if he were a sexual predator, or Nazi, etc

plenty of awful people have made great art, we (or I, at least) have to distinguish between the truly objectionable

not to excuse the vanity or self-centeredness or whatever it that leads to nonsense like that interview above

I hadn't known that about Wallace btw - the abusive relationship. that is the kind of thing that makes me reexamine how I think about someone's work.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
version said:
his book on infinity is riddled with errors and his essay on an American usage dictionary is a complete mess
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I'm not remotely qualified to know either way

tbh I've never read Infinite Jest and at this point I don't really want to. I have greatly admired some of his essay writing.

what I always think of with him is that extremely postmodern style - endless footnotes, footnotes to the footnotes etc - in the service of attempted emotional honesty

I'm not sure which part of that has been more influential

that quote above about AP is particularly unfortunate b/c Wallace's own work de facto makes a much better case for sincerity than that rambling nonsense
 
version

version

Well-known member
padraig (u.s.) said:
I hadn't known that about Wallace btw - the abusive relationship. that is the kind of thing that makes me reexamine how I think about someone's work.
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Yeah, it makes his "sincerity" seem even more hollow. He apparently threw Mary Karr out of a moving vehicle, threw a coffee table at her, threatened to buy a gun to shoot her husband, climbed up the side of her house in the middle of the night and followed her five-year old son home from school. He also allegedly told Jonathan Franzen that he slept with a minor during a book tour and it seems to be an accepted fact that he used to sleep with and bully his students when he taught in colleges.

Obviously he had his demons what with being in and out of AA and eventually killing himself, but it's still appalling.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
version said:
I've found myself wondering whether any of the other guys in AP are getting up to or fantasising the same stuff as Bateman.
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very interesting. I had never thought of that, but as soon as you said it, of course.

very in line with the idea that the murders (and their veracity) are in a way besides the point - that any of them could be Bateman

that thing you posted above about how "it's all true, besides the murders"

it's an inverse of his obsession/compulsion with fitting in to his peer group
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
version said:
re: Wallace - I don't know how smart he actually was. Apparently a lot of the math in Infinite Jest is wrong, his book on infinity is riddled with errors and his essay on an American usage dictionary is a complete mess.
Click to expand...
Certainly there is a bit where there is a formula that predicts the existence of a solution which he misunderstands and describes in IJ as giving you the solution - something quite different.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Apparently Wallace also made up or stole a bunch of the stuff in his nonfiction too. The more you read about him, the more he seems like a bit of a fraud tbh.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
padraig (u.s.) said:
I hadn't known that about Wallace btw - the abusive relationship. that is the kind of thing that makes me reexamine how I think about someone's work
Click to expand...
Wasn't it him who said that the reason that he was put on this earth was to put his penis in as many women as possible (certainly I've heard that attributed to him but I thought I'd heard it before of someone else).
 
version

version

Well-known member
Yeah, something like that. I think that was Franzen again. I guess he could be lying and Wallace isn't around to defend himself, but it doesn't sound out of character from what I've read about him.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
The thrill we get from discovering that some infinities are bigger than others, Wittgenstein thought, is just a “schoolboy pleasure.” There is nothing awesome about the theory; it does not describe a world of timeless, transcendent, scarcely conceivable entities; it is really no more than a collection of (finite) tricks of reasoning.

I guess it is (or Cantor's or Frege or whoever came up with it first - most likely a kinda joint effort between a lot of people at that time) a kinda of trick more than a revelation of a universal truth.... but I did find it pretty awesome and mindblowlng when I was, er, a schoolboy I guess. All those things like Russell's Paradox and HIlbert's Hotel etc really fascinated me. I always wished I'd studied that further.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
something I think about in relation to AP is the huge unspoken truth of the violence at the heart of all empires, empire processes

it's not as literal as the Romans, sending out senators to crush the unruly natives and extract provincial wealth

we living in a different time with subtler, or perhaps more complicated, processes

and there's the I guess intersectional angle as well - where gender (performative hypermasculinity and heteronormativity), class race, intersect
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
But fuck it... I think as soon as you start dealing with irrational numbers and even recurring rational decimals you have to start thinking about this don't you? There is something there that requires some kind of trick. Or something better than a trick.
 
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