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this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exaggerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.come to my blog!
he picked up a book. he read the book. it was him all over. the best version of himself! and the worst. what is postmodernism, really? is it a way to understand the world, to define the world, to separate yourself from the world... when you are actually a part of that world? a part of the so-called problem? you want to put a layer between you and the world. you are so much apart from it, right? an unwilling participant in all of those repulsive patriarchal and terminally corny signs and signi...
This summer I got this book from the library. I started on the cruise ship story and soon realized I would want my very own copy to dogear, underline, and do other dirty booknerd things to.David Foster Wallace, you are (were) genius! I think I may be in love with you! I love your footnotes- footnotes that range from a simple "duh!" or "!" to 2 page long footnotes that have footnotes themselves. Not a lot of authors could get away with that, but you, my love, can. Could. Did. Whatever.As I stated...
A Definitely Awesome Thing that I’ll Most Certainly Read AgainFull disclosure: I felt the smallest twinge of disappointment as I read these essays; (not because of the quality therein—there’s hardly any disappointment to be had there—but because it dawned on me that Infinite Jest, a book that I had spent the better part of February and March, slaving over and worshipping, was not in fact some work of genius that grew out of the side of DFW’s head and broke off one night in a fit of divinely insp...
There are two essays on tennis. And I suspect his perspective on tennis is unique in the history of the world. It's when he's examining the micro mechanics of tennis that you realise just what a rare and perilous place his delicately tuned mind was. And just how interwoven are madness and genius. He goes on a cruise and makes it seem like a dress rehearsal for a nursing home. A tightly formulated series of happy clapping rituals. Your desires not only anticipated and micromanaged but formulated
Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as his social comment...
David Foster Wallace is one awesomely smart guy. This is both his greatest strength and his potential Achilles heel as a writer. Personally, I will read anything this man writes, because I think he is a true genius with a rare sense of compassion, and a hilarious sense of humor. Even when his writing falls victim to its own cleverness, I still find it worthwhile - perhaps because one senses that the writer is a true mensch (not something I feel when being dazzled by the cleverness of a Dave Egge...
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a brilliant collection of "essays and arguments". This collection was published in 1997 exactly one year after Infinite Jest and is comprised of articles previously published from 1990 to 1996 in several different publications. His topics are tennis, television, a state fair, literary theory, David Lynch, and a luxury cruise. It doesn't matter if you are especially interested in these things or not, because you will be!1. Derivative Sport in Tornado
I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me. By far my favorite review of this book—and one of my favorite reviews on this site—is Geoff’s energetic paean. So I find it somewhat ironic that, setting out to write my own review, I am forced to begin with the opposite moral: do not trust the American-hype machine. This is not because everything popular is bad, nor because of any Orwellian or Ador
For some strange reason back in junior high school we were allowed a brief recess after lunch. The problem here is that there was very little to do during this recess. Here are the three activity choices that I remember:1. Mill around on the concrete like inmates always do in "the yard" on those prison television shows.2. Play a game that one of my fellow scholars evidentally invented that involved a mob of guys bouncing a tennis ball off of a wall and trying to nail each other in the testicles
2021 Update:*small soapbox rant*I've moved my rating from 4 to 5, as I'm starting to feel like I shouldn't 'downrate' writing I find excellent, innovative and necessary, just because I think it has a limited audience. I'm starting to trust my own opinion more because I'm starting to distrust the popular public opinion, and so my reviews from 2021 onwards are going to cater more to whoever likes what I read, rather than to what I think the general public will actually read.Following the death of
I've read one DFW book - The Broom of the System - and I didn't much care for it. (Though I recently read that the author himself didn't like that one, so - vindication!) Imagine my amazement at how much I enjoyed this collection of essays. There's some clever and insightful commentary here. Wallace even managed to make a subject I have zero interest in - tennis - fascinating. (Well, truthfully, by the second article on the sport, my fascination was dwindling.)Amid the forced joviality of a crui...
