David Foster Wallace RIP

jenks

jenks

thread death
I would - i have Pale King and am going to the event at Foyles on Friday which is kind of a launch thing for it. Planning on kicking the kids out to go and play with the traffic while i settle down with it and ignore the huge piles of marking I have to get through.

Cannot quite believe the buzz round this book - I remember when IJ came out he got a good smattering but everything afterwards was a meh shrug. Joe Pickering and the publicists at Penguin must have been working overtime to get every square inch of newsprint for this.
 
F

faustus

Well-known member
me too. it might take me a week or two to get hold of it, i don't exactly know when it'll be in the shops here in spain, but probably soon enough.
 
B

BareBones

wheezy
Book club sounds great, though my inner-cool-kid is screaming don't even think about it you fucking nerd at me. Not sure how much i'd be able to contribute though as I won't be able to start reading it for a few weeks yet anyway (i'm too broke to buy the book at the moment, and i've just started reading Bolano's 'Last Evenings On Earth' - which is great so far)
 
B

BareBones

wheezy
yeah i read that interview the other day, it's good. Seems like it was an extraordinarily hard task to put the book together, not least because the editor was a friend of DFW and so the whole thing was pretty sad and painful.

Another couple of really good articles i've found:

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

http://thisrecording.com/today/2011...ore-the-archives-of-david-foster-wallace.html

Loved discovering that his mum was a writer too, and wrote an apparently fantastic grammar textbook (like The Moms) - seems that she used the term "the howling fantods" in her book long before DFW had even thought about writing IJ.
 
Last edited:
you

you

Well-known member
BareBones said:
Book club sounds great, though my inner-cool-kid is screaming don't even think about it you fucking nerd at me. Not sure how much i'd be able to contribute though as I won't be able to start reading it for a few weeks yet anyway (i'm too broke to buy the book at the moment, and i've just started reading Bolano's 'Last Evenings On Earth' - which is great so far)
Click to expand...

I haven't ordered it yet so you have loads of time, I'm in the slow readers group too....

Looking back at this thread, depression is an inevitable theme - is it just me or does depression provide a definition, a clarity of world view that lends itself to great prose and quote-able texts?
 
P

paolo

Mechanical phantoms
I think people who have been depressed are better able to empathise with others, which I suppose could lead to more insightful writing

As an admin assistant in the civil service and also a bit of a nerd I am really looking forward to reading The Pale King
 
F

faustus

Well-known member
the-pale-king-cover.jpg



american cover (above) is a thousand times better than british cover (below). horrible. also, there's no hardback? a good thing, but strange, seems a missed opportunity to make extra cash


uk%20pale%20king%20sm.jpg
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
I'm not sure about 'The Pale King' because the posthumous (only) edition of 'This Is Water' had been subjected to a couple of highly questionable editorial decisions and it seems likely to me that this is going to be a lot more of the same - DFW and his editor would thrash things out at great length, apparently, and this won't have been through that process... also it's a crap title... but I'll probably still read it.

While we're at it everyone's a critic
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
faustus said:
the-pale-king-cover.jpg



american cover (above) is a thousand times better than british cover (below). horrible. also, there's no hardback? a good thing, but strange, seems a missed opportunity to make extra cash


uk%20pale%20king%20sm.jpg
Click to expand...

i have a hard back of the uk edition

this is intersting on the cover controv: http://tinycamels.wordpress.com/201...e-over-the-us-and-uk-covers-of-the-dfw-novel/

went to the talk with his agent and his editor at Foyles a week or so ago. Think they have really tried not to fuck around with his writing at all. There's going to be a whole website thing so we can see original papers etc associated with Pale King.
 
B

BareBones

wheezy
I'm about 200 pages in now and really enjoying it. Don't want to say much in case no one's started it yet but the first few chapters are very very different to his previous work, stylistically. Definitely wasn't expecting chapter 9, haha. It's hard to tell how unfinished it is really - so many of the chapters so far are like short little vignettes, a page long or so, which introduce characters etc, but it's impossible to say whether they're deliberately short for that reason or if he was intending to develop them further...

There's hardly any footnotes either, which is a bit disappointing, as i love those in all his other stuff. I guess he might've added these later or something.

PS the UK cover is SO much better than the US one.
 
S

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
you said:
I haven't ordered it yet so you have loads of time, I'm in the slow readers group too....

Looking back at this thread, depression is an inevitable theme - is it just me or does depression provide a definition, a clarity of world view that lends itself to great prose and quote-able texts?
Click to expand...

I reckon a clarity of world view leads to depression.

I said earlier that depression would lend itself to writing things down, but I take that back. Depression, by definition, lends itself to nothing. It is the ultimate de-motivator. I think DFW was manic depressive which would be a better explanation. That's where all the creative depressives come from, because people with manic depression tend to get very prolific during bouts of mania. It also doesn't hurt that he was a precocious genius-child with two professor parents (his mother, in particular, in English Composition.)
 
you

you

Well-known member
I still haven't had mine yet, it's taking a long time to arrive, I'm really looking forward to it though...

--EDIT--

16/05/2011 - arrived! - So, who's reading this?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top