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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
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.
I hope you’ll bear with me here. You are walking down a long, descended hallway. It does not curve nor have any fancy turns. It goes immediately north. The hallway is neither well lit nor is it dark or dim, maybe perfectly described as bright. The walls are all nearly bear aside from, maybe, very banal and possibly cliche paintings of like Midwest cornfields or wheat pastures or like 4 cows all standing staring meaningfully at the sun. You walk for a while down the hallway. Before you can even see the end, it just sort of… ends.
That’s the book. I think writing about the active role of leading boring or semi-mundane experiences is one of those things that just sound so atrociously cool. It is one thing to do this actively and then another to make it somehow interesting and expansive.
This is the first time I think I’ve felt in a weird way “lucky” to have read a book because it feels in many ways the whole thing just shouldn’t exist but does. And I’m thoroughly glad it does, even in its current form.
I don’t wanna rate it though cause it feels awfully strange to but it’s 5 for Mr. Pietsch who somehow edited this thing cohesively enough for a viable story to be told.
That’s the book. I think writing about the active role of leading boring or semi-mundane experiences is one of those things that just sound so atrociously cool. It is one thing to do this actively and then another to make it somehow interesting and expansive.
This is the first time I think I’ve felt in a weird way “lucky” to have read a book because it feels in many ways the whole thing just shouldn’t exist but does. And I’m thoroughly glad it does, even in its current form.
I don’t wanna rate it though cause it feels awfully strange to but it’s 5 for Mr. Pietsch who somehow edited this thing cohesively enough for a viable story to be told.
DFW is uncanny in his ability to write humanity. While there wasn't much TO this story, really (it being unfinished), it was still so unabashedly human. Every character had his or her relatable stories and quirks, and I loved (almost) every moment of reading this book (the tax passages could get a little tedious). I enjoyed how the book was structured, too - I wish I knew more about tax law, so I could understand what each section heading referred to (and if it was anything significant). All in all, a very enjoyable read.
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
DFW's last, unfinished, novel is still pretty impressive. The "plot" (such as it is) involves a handful of employees at an IRS regional processing center in Middle-of-Nowhere, Illinois, their (mostly sad) back stories and their (somewhat) special abilities. For a book obsessed with the idea of boredom -- what it is, how we deal with it, what it does to your psyche, etc. -- it is incredibly engaging, especially in the long first-person narratives where the employees relate their stories. There are also long passages made up mostly of tax code references and government-speak that (I think) are meant to illustrate the very boredom that is such an important part of the book's subject matter. I'm glad that Wallace's family and his editor were able to compile this incomplete version of the novel, but it makes me incredibly sad that he never lived to finish it, as I think it would have been on par with Infinite Jest.
A powerful and profoundly sad novel from the late DFW. Although this novel is clearly unfinished and lacking the master's final touch, there is a quiet frankness and subtlety to his prose that is absent in his other works. And while none of the writing here strikes the somber chords of Oblivion, it's difficult not to be moved by the tragic irony of this novel's central theme: existential boredom and how to survive it.
It’s been about 5 months since I read this book and I still think of a certain chapter at least once a day. Incredible!
It's not finished, and still better than most books I've read. It's like Infinite Jest in the sense that there are a lot of seemingly unrelated narratives with completely different voices, talking about a bunch of different topics. The center of this happens to be an IRS office in Central Illinois. The major themes are the subject of concentration in the face of boredom, and whether machines could/should replace humans for certain tasks. There's a weird thing thrown in there, there is a fictional character named after the author, who claims to be the author of the book itself, but then turns out to be just another protagonist in the novel. Weird, not sure what that was all about. If you liked Infinite Jest, you'll like the Pale King. If you want to start reading David Wallace, this is not a bad place to start.
While there's the feeling this is unfinished after you get through it, it's not as overt as I expected going into it. Several scenes from the book have stuck with me over the years and while it's not as timeless as I would say Infinite Jest is, there is absolutely elements of that same timelessness in the depictions of mundane workdays and the long sigh of capitalism.