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munchin's review against another edition
4.0
There's some truly great stuff in here, especially the two tennis essays, the Terminator 2 essay and the very short list of underrated novels, but this is probably the least compelling DFW collection I've read.
avicosmos's review against another edition
4.0
This is a different world built with familiar words. How, I wonder, can that be? How can words mean something alone and something very different when set together in a certain way? Words are mechanical things, how can they inspire emotion? No, how can they be emotions themselves?
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**
The essays presented in Both Flesh and Not are very becoming of the title. My interpretation, maybe a wrong one, is that the title refers to things that are human and alive and things that are mechanical. Both of these are important. I cannot judge the essays individually, I believe I only grasped about 70% of them. That's not enough to pass judgement. Instead, I will tell write about some of the feelings that the book brewed in me.
Tennis was this guy's thing. It is amazing how big a thing it is to him. But maybe, like me, the reader doesn't follow tennis. I didn't even know the rules of the game, let alone the many great players he mentions. By the time I'm done reading how Federer's game is one of the paradigms of beauty, I felt I learned half the game. Agassi V. Federer was the game he writes about, but the detours he takes both in the main text and the footnotes should not work towards a great article. But they do, they do it so exquisitely.
Something: People blame him sometimes for being too high brow, too intelligent and arrogant because he knows it. The feel I got was he was trying his best to humanize everything. Everything.
That's what the detours are for. I don't call them digressions because digressions usually lead to places where one is required to say: 'Anyway, what was I talking about?' Some good may come from that digressions, or may not.
There are very few such digressions he makes. I call them detours because like in detours they are made so as to visit some place or idea in the middle of the bigger idea that is being presented. Almost always some good comes from that. That's why after the first few footnotes, you don't mind breaking away from the main text, you start to welcome some of them.
In this essay or another about tennis- something about money making at tennis games- he writes about a woman who finds him repulsive. This is a footnote in an essay about tennis game.
One glaring attempt of humanising things in the book was his simple one sentence, three-word review of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A novel that asks for a good essay on itself. He simply writes: Don't even ask.
Another one of his things was Cinema, maybe he wasn't as fanatical about it as he was about Tennis. There is an essay about the (as it were) seminal importance of Terminator 2. He alludes to the decline of cinema in this; alludes to how, like everything, it stopped being art and started being a business. He picks Terminator 2 because that's where the mindless CGI epidemic that still ails Hollywood today started. He doesn't entirely imply that T2 was mindless, he says its use of CGI has opened doors to mindlessness that later became a forte for Hollywood.
And then it writes about sex and how it cannot and shouldn't be a loveless process.
And about the meaning and mismeanings of general words. This is more of a writer's thing.
In between the essays, there are words he liked and typed into his personal computer or something. These are words that would be deemed obscure by someone who isn't well-read. I'm one of those someones. There were but a handful of words that I recognised.
One of the words that lingered in my mind: Satyromaniac.
It expanded my world just a little. I wasn't even aware of the idea of male nymphomania. It did not exist for me, and then it did once I read the word. That goes some way in explaining his obsession with words and Wittgenstein, who believed once that our world and existence were limited by language; that the horizons of language were the same horizons of existence.
**I have never reviewed a book of essays and I'm pretty sure this isn't the way to go about it. I just put down some things in the book of many, many things. I hope I didn't kill whatever zeal you had to read this book.**
marshamudpuddle's review against another edition
4.0
The title essay is brilliant, and the best of DFW's many excellent essays on tennis. My love of tennis partially stems from it!
windycorner's review against another edition
4.0
David Foster Wallace is one of those oft-dropped writer names. You're supposed to have read him. At the time of his tragic death in 2008, I realized I never had. Situation corrected. I'm sort of stunned. The guy was so smart and so Word Knowledgeable that if he'd been in school with me, I would have crumpled in defeat over his mere proximity.
Admittedly, I didn't enjoy the essays about tennis. No one can cause me to enjoy a sports essay. But some of the others blew me away. In "The Nature of the Fun," DFW offers permission to stop writing when one's motives have gotten off track. "Back in New Fire" discusses the possible long-term effects of AIDS on our sexual attitudes. (DFW asserts that there is no such thing as casual sex. This concept carries more weight coming from the Real World than it does from religious purity cultures, where you expect to find it.) I learned more from "Twenty-Four Word Notes" than I did in some of my college classes. If my path crosses yours in the next few days, expect me to drop a really outrageous new word on you.
Admittedly, I didn't enjoy the essays about tennis. No one can cause me to enjoy a sports essay. But some of the others blew me away. In "The Nature of the Fun," DFW offers permission to stop writing when one's motives have gotten off track. "Back in New Fire" discusses the possible long-term effects of AIDS on our sexual attitudes. (DFW asserts that there is no such thing as casual sex. This concept carries more weight coming from the Real World than it does from religious purity cultures, where you expect to find it.) I learned more from "Twenty-Four Word Notes" than I did in some of my college classes. If my path crosses yours in the next few days, expect me to drop a really outrageous new word on you.
knarusk's review against another edition
4.0
All Tennis essays get 5 stars, possibly more.
The one about Sampras and Philippoussis match at 1996 US open is as funny as Federer’s is a religious experience.
The one about Sampras and Philippoussis match at 1996 US open is as funny as Federer’s is a religious experience.
infinitejoe's review against another edition
4.0
Probably a 3.5, but since the coders at Goodreads continue to have sustained trouble with fractions, unlike other social book sites, I will round up to 4, especially considering it's DFW we're talking about.
Although the essays were good, and the writing top-notch as always, I couldn't help feeling like these were the leftovers, the flotsam and jetsam of the DFW arsenal. I know many of these were published earlier, but they probably weren't collected and anthologized previously for a reason. Don't get me wrong. The essays are good, but they are not comparable, as a whole, to DFW's earlier essay collections.
Regardless, as I was reading the last essay in the collection, a feeling of melancholy washed over me, knowing that I was completing the only work of DFW that I haven't yet read (excluding the book on infinity, which I may still get to, being a math geek and all). I guess a re-reading of Infinite Jest is in my future later this year. I just don't see not reading any more DFW being an option.
Although the essays were good, and the writing top-notch as always, I couldn't help feeling like these were the leftovers, the flotsam and jetsam of the DFW arsenal. I know many of these were published earlier, but they probably weren't collected and anthologized previously for a reason. Don't get me wrong. The essays are good, but they are not comparable, as a whole, to DFW's earlier essay collections.
Regardless, as I was reading the last essay in the collection, a feeling of melancholy washed over me, knowing that I was completing the only work of DFW that I haven't yet read (excluding the book on infinity, which I may still get to, being a math geek and all). I guess a re-reading of Infinite Jest is in my future later this year. I just don't see not reading any more DFW being an option.
olde_fortran's review against another edition
5.0
After reading DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again I was unsure of him as an essayist. This changed my mind. Wonderful essays (with one slight clunker).
goomz's review
3.0
For essentially being a posthumous "worst-of" collection, this was still pretty dang good. Yet, I can no longer tell people interested in David Foster Wallace to "start anywhere"…
My favorites were generally the shorter ones, with my personal favorite being The Nature of Fun, which seems to be DFW's answers to the questions and personal concerns he wrote about in a letter to DeLillo. I'm unfortunately writing a novel myself, and DFW (as always) describes the beginning stages of writing with such perfect acuity…I trust everything he says will happen later. He cites a morbid analogy Don DeLillo gives in his [b:Mao II|402|Mao II|Don DeLillo|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388194999s/402.jpg|2456942] (which I still haven't read) comparing an unfinished novel to an grotesque deformed child. The book J R (which DFW has definitely read and has talked about in different places) has a very similar analogy to this, that either Don DeLillo was nodding to in his book (DeLillo and Gaddis were friends), or DFW (gasp) might have actually been talking about, and simply cited the wrong novel…which I doubt. It's strange that DFW didn't at least point out the connection in his essay; maybe he was concerned about how the somewhat irrelevant digression would impact flow…not that it's ever stopped him before…I'll update both of these reviews once I read Mao II and find out for myself.
All of his reviews are entertaining and witty, with his Terminator 2 essay being a highlight of all of them. You have to appreciate the asshole-ish way he got around the 1,000 word limit imposed by Rain Taxi for his essay Best of the Prose Poem, and the way he took his time to give useless tidbits (like the square root of the journal's ISBN) for the heck of it. It's notable that this collection has two different reviews for [b:Wittgenstein's Mistress|51506|Wittgenstein's Mistress|David Markson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347696167s/51506.jpg|1278359]. The first being preeetty excruciating, and the second being a mere paragraph long (and it does a better job at making you want to read it than the first essay, as well).
And then, there's that very unique take on grammar, which makes me wish DFW wrote a handbook on writing and grammar. That stuff would sell like hotcakes! Fun fact for you Mac-owners: open up the pre-installed Dictionary.app, and look up one of the words from the essay, like "hairy" or "beauty". Whazzam! DFW's installed on every new Mac computer! How about that? (If you're completely confounded by why this is so, as I was, it turns out that the Dictionary.app is actually a searchable Oxford Dictionary of English and [b:Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus|4315527|Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus|Christine A. Lindberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347794071s/4315527.jpg|125270], the latter of which DFW's word notes were written for.)
Go read it. Or save it, since it's probably going to be last David Foster Wallace anyone's going to see.
My favorites were generally the shorter ones, with my personal favorite being The Nature of Fun, which seems to be DFW's answers to the questions and personal concerns he wrote about in a letter to DeLillo. I'm unfortunately writing a novel myself, and DFW (as always) describes the beginning stages of writing with such perfect acuity…I trust everything he says will happen later. He cites a morbid analogy Don DeLillo gives in his [b:Mao II|402|Mao II|Don DeLillo|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388194999s/402.jpg|2456942] (which I still haven't read) comparing an unfinished novel to an grotesque deformed child. The book J R (which DFW has definitely read and has talked about in different places) has a very similar analogy to this, that either Don DeLillo was nodding to in his book (DeLillo and Gaddis were friends), or DFW (gasp) might have actually been talking about, and simply cited the wrong novel…which I doubt. It's strange that DFW didn't at least point out the connection in his essay; maybe he was concerned about how the somewhat irrelevant digression would impact flow…not that it's ever stopped him before…I'll update both of these reviews once I read Mao II and find out for myself.
All of his reviews are entertaining and witty, with his Terminator 2 essay being a highlight of all of them. You have to appreciate the asshole-ish way he got around the 1,000 word limit imposed by Rain Taxi for his essay Best of the Prose Poem, and the way he took his time to give useless tidbits (like the square root of the journal's ISBN) for the heck of it. It's notable that this collection has two different reviews for [b:Wittgenstein's Mistress|51506|Wittgenstein's Mistress|David Markson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347696167s/51506.jpg|1278359]. The first being preeetty excruciating, and the second being a mere paragraph long (and it does a better job at making you want to read it than the first essay, as well).
And then, there's that very unique take on grammar, which makes me wish DFW wrote a handbook on writing and grammar. That stuff would sell like hotcakes! Fun fact for you Mac-owners: open up the pre-installed Dictionary.app, and look up one of the words from the essay, like "hairy" or "beauty". Whazzam! DFW's installed on every new Mac computer! How about that? (If you're completely confounded by why this is so, as I was, it turns out that the Dictionary.app is actually a searchable Oxford Dictionary of English and [b:Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus|4315527|Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus|Christine A. Lindberg|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347794071s/4315527.jpg|125270], the latter of which DFW's word notes were written for.)
Go read it. Or save it, since it's probably going to be last David Foster Wallace anyone's going to see.
shellyhartner's review against another edition
4.0
Wildly uneven. Some of Wallace's points are absolutely profound, others seem petty. At least one essay on tennis made me strangely nostalgic for reading the Harper's Index in the 90's. More than one essay made me feel woefully under-educated and under-read.