Jon Baskin on David Foster Wallace

Excellent essay about David Foster Wallace's work and legacy here. Jon Baskin claims in "Death Is Not The End" that "with the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce." Baskin argues that we should read Wallace's work as a series of Wittgensteinian therapies designed specifically to cure us of our addiction, the most fundamental of all our addictions, "to a highly reflexive and indulgent way of thinking." In particular, he seems to suggest, Wallace uses the machinery of post-modern writing and thought as the only way in which to connect with readers weened on this type of literature. "Many people in America already knew that AA worked; Wallace, however, was the first to propose it as a solution to the problem of postmodern thinking. This problem had the structure of addiction, he suggested. That was why it took a sophisticated, difficult novel like Infinite Jest to make the people who tend to read sophisticated, difficult novels think hard about things that were meaningful and true."

J. Robert Lennon on David Foster Wallace

Great post from J. Robert Lennon on the death of DFW: "The lesson to take away from this, for all of us who write fiction, is to stop being such wimp-assed pencil pushers and get out of our comfort zones once and for all. Wallace isn't going to cover us anymore. If contemporary literature is going to be taken seriously, we're going to have to make literature worth taking seriously, even if it fails, as so much of Wallace's brilliantest stuff did. Otherwise we'll be relegated to the cultural footnote the film industry has been stuffing us into for years. Fiction writing should not be an amusing affectation. It should be the ultimate expression of being human, as Wallace thought it should be. Try harder. That's what we all have to do."
Read the whole thing plus much more at the blog he shares with Rhian Ellis and Ed Skoog, Ward Six.

New Foster Wallace

Many thanks to my dear friend J-Credit for pointing out the story I missed in the Guardian despite reading it every day. It seems that David Foster Wallace's wife found a 200 page manuscript of an incomplete novel in the garage when she was going through his stuff. Called "The Pale King," it's set in a tax office in the mid-West and is slated to be published in full early in 2010. The New Yorker have printed an extract, "The Wiggle Room," which deals - in those long, snaky, rollercoaster sentences - with boredom. Once you've oriented yourself it's very funny (and very Pynchonian). Apparently, it's supposed to be a move away from the "audacious 'maximalist' style" of his earlier work to "a new, more straightforward technical direction," but it still reads very much like David Foster Wallace to me (which is no bad thing). There's also a very long accompanying essay by DT Max which I only just found. I haven't read it yet, but it seems, if the Guardian is to be believed, that it paints Wallace's decision to quit his medication (which ultimately led to his suicide) as an attempt to break out of a "creative impasse" and finish the book. Maybe I'll check that and come back to this. Or maybe I won't.

Bolaño and "The Big Book of the Decade"

I'm slightly taken aback by the wave of Bolañomania sweeping the English-speaking world. Like the indie-elitist I am, I tend only to like books or records if they're unknown or unloved by everyone else. The misfittery is part of what makes them loveable. Now I find myself caught up in the giant shitstorm that is the international Bolaño bull market. Was he a heroin addict (who cares?)? How many more "lost" books did he have hidden on a campsite in Southern France (how many can the Jackal write?)? And so on... It's a "buy Bolano, sell DFW" situation. He's the only dead-author stock that's going up.

It's funny how once a decade we get a huge "totalising" book that everyone goes nuts about (even James Wood, who will then spend the next ten years slagging off every book that follows in its wake). There was "Gravity's Rainbow" in 1973, "Life A User's Manual" in 1987, "Infinite Jest" in 1996 and now "2666" in 2008/9. And the rest of the time this sort of writing (which Woods famously termed "hysterical realism," calling for a post-9/11 return to the smaller canvas of books about the sons of vicars writing books about sons of vicars just as his own first novel about a son of a vicar came out...) gets sneered at, mainly by the likes of Alfred Hickling at the Guardian (who said that "Savage Detectives" was masturbatory. Dunce). It's as if one exception is allowed every ten years or so, and everyone waxes lyrical about it before returning to write neat and tidy books with very little ambition at all. So, as the likes of Vollman have found out, if you're going to write "the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown" (Bolaño) you'd better make sure your timing is spot on. And if you're about to embark on such a work now, make sure you spend the best part of a decade on it...

David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone and the leaving-be of dead geniuses

I guess the Rolling Stone piece on David Foster Wallace is old news in the States, but the magazine doesn't carry quite the same cultural weight over here so I only read it last week. It's a well-written, well-meaning piece, I think, very readable - almost compulsively so - and with some quotes from DFW, that would be cherishable in other circumstances ("if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me"). But there's something vaguely distasteful about the whole thing, this urge we have to pry into his life and the lives of those who loved him (loved him, not his books!). From the title onward ("The Lost Years & Last Days of..." - what "lost years"? the guy seemed pretty fuckin' productive to me...), the piece also plays the "tortured genius" card to the max, which is how we like our real-life geniuses, it seems, perhaps deep down because we want to punish them from being cleverer than us. But surely you reduce DFW as a writer and as a human being by shoe-horning his life and work into such a cliched old narrative? At times the article treats him like Hal (the computer, not the young prince) - an oversensitive uber-brain that eats itself. In fact he was a great writer who also happened to suffer from and struggle with mental illness, much as Charlie Parker was a great musician who had to suffer from and struggle with heroin addiction. The one doesn't make the other, or illuminate it.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. I guess just that there's nothing we all like better than a dead writer, preferably a brilliant one who has been given a genius medal. It gives us something to write about (like this equally despicable little piece) and in doing so we all get paid - either directly or through basking in reflected glory, or just generating a few more hits for our pathetic little blogs. Really, we should all just read "Infinite Jest" again and shut up. Or not read it. But definitely shut up.