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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
Seriously genius - I can’t wait to read Infinite Jest someday
AB
AB
This was torrent of anguish punctuated with jaw-dropping bliss. There is only subjunction in a matter like this. Reading this has initiated a personal interrogation of what defines a memory. I will likely muse further throughout the week.
challenging
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I very much enjoy DFW's writing, but this is a very unfinished book that reads kind of like a first draft. Seems to me that the editor should have left the piles of notes and unfinished writing in the boxes he found them in, rather than using his "best judgement" to put a book together.
"The making of a David Foster Wallace book" Keen insights, often relatable. I thoroughly enjoyed.
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
http://jeffreyellinger.com/2011/04/27/a-short-dicussion-on-the-pale-king/
I loved the writing, I just wish DFW had been able to finish the book. It definitely deserved to be published, yet it left me wanting to know what exactly was the point. I imagine, if he'd lived, he'd have edited this down to become one amazingly well written novel.
I loved the writing, I just wish DFW had been able to finish the book. It definitely deserved to be published, yet it left me wanting to know what exactly was the point. I imagine, if he'd lived, he'd have edited this down to become one amazingly well written novel.
I tried to finish this book and I just couldn't. There are books I want to read and this isn't one of them.
The perfect book for the tedium of tax season is here in DFW’s unfinished book before he died. In a way, you can say this is a antithesis to Infinite Jest which dealt with being entertained to death.
The Pale King deals with being bored to death.
It’s told in a series of very loosely connected short stories set in an IRS office in Illinois as we see how living this job has different effects on each perspective. Think of it like a more psychological take on The Office. This was a more approachable book than Infinite Jest but still a bit of a slog to get through. Still this was nice to see and to explore the mental anguish of a full time job.
The Pale King deals with being bored to death.
It’s told in a series of very loosely connected short stories set in an IRS office in Illinois as we see how living this job has different effects on each perspective. Think of it like a more psychological take on The Office. This was a more approachable book than Infinite Jest but still a bit of a slog to get through. Still this was nice to see and to explore the mental anguish of a full time job.
Supervisors at the IRS's regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.The more I move away from the center to the margins of reading and knowledge and all the related like, the less of a hold I have on whatever grips training imbued me with that defined said center as the center. Case in point for many formerly unquestioned favorites in recent years: Faulkner, Maugham, and now perhaps DFW, perhaps because the action tends towards recalibration than knocking off the pedestal. It wouldn't be nearly as bad if the waves of cult following were further out, but that's what happens whenever neurotypical hordes get their filthy hands on a somewhat famous neuroatypical: fetishization, equating of chemically driven suicidal impulses (you didn't think you keep feeling like still living under your own conscious power, did you?) to necessary fuel for the delight of the enculterated masses, and a final solemnity once the artist has burned themselves out in a world that was necessarily cruel. Remove the necessity and subsequent cruelty from the equation, and you lose the fapping off story akin to Me Before You and are left with little more than solitary confinment, so you see why sane people don't want to hear that their sadness over insane David Foster Wallace's killing himself isn't worth shit.
'They believed in rationality—they believed that persons of privilege, literacy, education, and moral sophistication would be able to emulate them, to make judicious and self-disciplined decisions for the good of the nation and not just to advance their own interests.'Here's the other thing. I refuse to believe that someone as smart as DFW comes off has utterly refused to question everything he comes across, and I don't mean the Wikipedia guided white boy excursions commonly thrown around as common cause for garnering a PhD. I mean that little tidbit right above, which takes a passage that sounds mighty fine, strips it of its fancy syntax and loaded vocabulary, dresses it back up again with sociopolitical context, and then shoves it forward to face the future consequences of its past existence. If the entirety of the book had been as such, or hell, hadn't been the very opposite in so many places, I would have been perfectly fine in joining in with the adulation. However, what was there (and jfc I know DFW offed himself in the middle of it. My brain's been telling me to kill myself long enough for me to know how to take that into account on a bred-into-the-bone level, so unless you've experienced the same as DFW and me, you're in no position to judge), was to put it kindly, a particularly limited breed of magical realism.
'It's certainly an imaginative and ingenious rationalization of racism and male chauvinism, that's for sure.'
[N]ow he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time.Yes. Magical realism. You know, that thing that non-white people get saddled with since they can't access the hallowed halls of Modernism and Post-Modernism and Experimentalism and all that jazz (oh look, more black people contributed to white halls) that manages to invoke all the patronizing and restricting and nullifying powers of a gaze that's been fucking with the globe for the last 500 years. Now, DFW not getting the same label really doesn't make any sense, cause not only is he writing of a place where the ratio of men to women is ten to one and the ratio of white men to women of color is 100 to one (and she's the only one to deal with sexual favors. Fancy that), but he has more ghosts and telepathics and levitating yet secular monks than he does 'blacks' and 'Orientals' (his words). Better yet, when the very marrow of the Mad Men™ shows up in a classroom, radiating authority and masculinity through very rigid and even more artificial constructs of hair arrangement and tattoo display and dress code, DFW doesn't question it. You have 50 or so pages on the intricacies of rush hour and architectural domination and said effects on a particular psyche, but questioning why the Man is the Man? Other than a brief mutter of capitalism (you've got a Jewish man to thank for that, DFW, so I don't know why you're pulling the Jewish money character in a sort of wink wink he might be Jewish and he might be a banker but the two can totally coexist without you labeling me with your stereotypes thank you very much shindig), nada. Zilch. As if DFW got the totality of his history from the History Channel (which unlike the implications of the name does not whatsoever have to stick to telling the facts 24/7), and that shit doesn't fly.
Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment, X.Here's another thing: If you're an aspiring author and you want to both incorporate discussion of warring interiorities and fill your landscape with various grotesques, you better make sure you've read both [a:W.E.B. Du Bois|10710|W.E.B. Du Bois|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1211293877p2/10710.jpg] and [a:Flannery O'Connor|22694|Flannery O'Connor|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1469878767p2/22694.jpg], else you'll look like nothing more than a damn fool. Whole litanies of pages of the tortured and the visibly neurodivergent and physical violations of the aesthetic status quo, and yet we spend all our time with the white boy with a perspiration problem. Such missed opportunities, especially with a work that supposedly tackles the monstrosity of boredom. I'm sure the one woman of color who spends part of her work time sucking cock gets bored, so wouldn't that be an interesting category to conceptualize. Or how about that 'Oriental' that's taller than normal, does he ever get bored about white people coming up to him and simply staring? Or maybe the woman with the super fucked up childhood had some moments of boredom that weren't glossed over with aping-at-Cormac-McCarthy prose in between the various sexual assaults and murder (a woman in this DFW universe is either horribly traumatized, horribly pretty, some horrible mix of the two, or horribly doesn't exist). That, however, would involve dragging in all those messy ideas of race and gender and race/gender when it comes to the sole woman of color which are such a numbfuckery to deal with and tend to fuck with Du Bois' and O'Connor's reputations in the aftermath of their writings, and that just wouldn't go down so well with a narrative that invoked critical consciousness a grand total of one time and then fucked off to frolic in a fairy tale land of whiteness galore. Never mind that autistic people are apparently incapable of having a happy childhood while having at the same time a Jesus figure that totally reads as autistic. That would've been corrected in the first round of edits.
This is my crude approximation of a human life.Yes, David Foster Wallace killed himself. No, that doesn't mean I have to like the book he was writing right up to his point of no return. Could it have been great? Well, the turnaround on the Pretty Self-Tortured Girl's narrative transcribed in the end notes holds out hope that DFW wasn't actually going to put the entire burden of destabilizing eugenics in the US on those deprived of their humanity via said eugenics and then shove it all in a hole in the public conscience and bury it, so perhaps that godawful train wreck of an ending passage wouldn't have lowered my rating a solid star. I still don't get how you can swallow that much of a dictionary and never ever ever question how that widely and systematically and corporately accepted entity came to be, mutterings about capitalism and human machines aside (ever seen what disabled people are paid? or heard of a little old concept called slavery that's still legal sometimes under the 13th amendment? you're on the right track). All in all, if you want to go PoMo and not go home, you better rip the floor out from under your feet and your heart from out of your chest and follow the wonderland all the way down, else I would've gotten more mindblowing insight from following the latest Fox News update on the Trump/Russia business. Time waits for no author.
It was a bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.Rest in peace, DFW. If neurotypicals don't learn from your example that human sacrifice is never acceptable, they never will.
As every American knows, it is totally possible for contempt and anxiety to coexist in the human heart.
And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.
-Infinite Jest
Well, it was interesting, for sure. I really appreciated the overarching theory and exploration of boredom--that if you can conquer boredom, you can do anything. However, it is painful to explore boredom by reading the detailed the boredom of the work lives of IRS workers. However, the back stories are amazing. Except that many of them involve bullying, which is difficult for me to read about. The writing is sometimes really remarkable. Wallace died while writing this long unfinished novel, but it doesn't seem incomplete. I had mixed feelings about it, obviously. The bookstore said they can't keep this or any of the stuff on the shelves.