The Pale King

Most of us, of course, don’t realize any of these processes are going on; we just think that consuming fiction feels good. But, as with sex, Boyd notes, pleasure and other enjoyable emotions are a kind of bait, coaxing us to do things that will help propagate our genes. The affection we feel toward fictional characters like Dorothy Gale or Tom Sawyer is akin to the warm belonging we seek among friends and family, drawing us into the kind of group affiliation that can spell the difference between life and death. The late novelist David Foster Wallace once told me that reading fiction made him “feel unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness.” That profound sense of comfort he described is, as he correctly perceived, quintessentially human, an incentive to keep connecting with each other despite our inevitable conflicts and tensions.

via The evolutionary argument for Dr. Seuss | Salon Books

After Chesterton and Emerson, a footnote from David Foster Wallace:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. 

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: 

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

“‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

via David Foster Wallace, Kenyon, 2005 – Top 10 Commencement Speeches – TIME

Because I’m really a fan of short fiction and essays, critical and personal, I took serious affections with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again & Consider the Lobster; Girl with Curious Hair made me Boy w/ curious hair. He made me laugh, laugh my ass off while reading, and trying to bring others around, especially while living in Omaha, was something I always caught shit for. He was too egotistical, arrogant, boring, plodding and, most common, not funny. No; wrong. David Foster Wallace taught me that you can be fucking funny and very smart at the same time.

And all of these pseudo-intelligent/philosophical arguments and animosity from a writer’s workshop of mostly fiction writing antagonists who found it all the more convenient to disregard an author w/o even reading a word of their work. (As a writer who is honestly incapable of reading every book after the fire at Alexandria, I am guilty of this, too, but usually only when I have good sources informing me.) I have read everything David Sedaris has put down on paper now and realize this one commonality: they both believe/d there is much more than truth-telling in non-fiction. Sedaris just writes the same essay over and over again, which suited the beaches in Florida just fine, but I cannot even imagine trying to read David Foster Wallace on the beach. If I saw me w/ Foster Wallace on the beach I’d kick sand in my face.

via thehardhours: DFW w/ featuring Padon and friends and family

This definition of the family word SNOOT (an acronym for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time”) appears in footnote number five of David Foster Wallace’s review article “Authority and American Usage” (in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Little, Brown and Company, 2005). There, the acclaimed author of Infinite Jest devotes more than 50 smart and entertaining pages to the topic of grammar–in particular, to the dispute between “linguistic conservatives” and “linguistic liberals,” otherwise known as the Prescriptivists vs. the Descriptivists.

via What Is a SNOOT – Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar – David Foster Wallace and SNOOTitude – definition and examples of snoot

“SNOOT” is Wallace’s acronymic term for people who deeply, genuinely, and anal-retentively care about correct and effective language use, per his essay “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster. If you want to know what SNOOT stands for, I encourage you to read the essay.

via Daily Kos: I did not know that he was dead

“I think [The Pale King] is as good as Infinite Jest. I’m really, really blown away by what I’ve read. It’s absolutely incredible. The level of writing is so high. It’s just so tremendously sad that [Wallace] didn’t realise how close he was to what he wanted to achieve.”

–Simon Prosser, interviewed in The Guardian

via toruokada: amazon.cat

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jestis the War and Peace for those who prefer their literature contemporary, American. The book’s heft, textual density and, uhm, endnotes, have also made it one of the more challenging reads in recent fiction. But a group of literary bloggers are undeterred and have decided to tackle DFW’s masterwork this summer and coined the summer of 2009 as Infinite Summer. From their site:

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat. 

via Make 2009 an Infinite Summer – The Afterword

Did I already say what we’d agreed early on? That our job together was to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: can the book live without this? Knowing how much this book would demand of readers, and how easy it would be to put it down or never pick it up simply because of its daunting size, we agreed that many passages should come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them. Given that the notes were almost by definition secondary, I invited a lot of them to leave. Of course to David they were not secondary. They were further evidence of the many separate levels of life and thought we’re all carrying on at all times. And he insisted that many of them stay that I thought could well have come out.

via Recidivism.: This is wicked..

Wallace’s side of the correspondence is mostly a fan letter.  I was pleased by his love for End Zone, my favorite DeLillo novel and undeniably the funniest.  He suggests that a piece of Infinite Jest “owes a rather uncomfortable debt” to End Zone; which piece?

via Don DeLillo to David Foster Wallace, on reading math « Quomodocumque