David Foster Wallace
Maybe if I didn't find other people's enthusiasm so infectious I'd hold back my thoughts. Moreover: enthusiasm for a writer who seems to've gone out of his way to show that something could be done without it.
I hadn't read him until picking up Brief Interviews with Hideous Men the other week. The last two stories were fine. This afternoon I opened up Infinite Jest, and read about 50 pages before setting it down and pouring myself a glass of water. I was thirsty.
----
Hearing what you hear. A few weeks ago, a stranger told me that she liked to write, and she thought, frowning to herself, that there might be something theatrical about that, something egotistic, she wasn't sure.
Too much ego or none at all? I asked.
I hope none at all.
I said I thought it was interesting that the 'outdoor' voice we hear on a recording, if we're unused to it, sounds like a thin knockoff of the 'indoor' voice we know. We learn that we have to play with the acoustics a bit when learning to speak publicly, and over time we get the knack of how to speak outdoors, begin to notice some of the outdoor sounds in our indoor voices, and adjust ourselves to those when we have to. Singing is different: here we've always been more than we are, too much ourselves. Ever had a speech impediment?
It's gone.
----
Unseeing what you see. Artless exercises. I think it was Ernst Mach who once sat down on a couch and drew himself without a mirror. How am I to myself, really? he asked himself. He (Malkovich?) closed his right eye and drew a few wisps of a white beard, first, no head, no neck, and then one large sleepy-looking shoulder off to the left. The rest of the body from the chest to feet, small, foreshortened, curves away and -- disappears like a rabbit into the weeds on the other side of the house.
----
As for IJ, what to say. Even next to Hideous Men it reads like juvenilia. Found myself scratching over the page with a capped pen, every other sentence, just to keep myself going, and this started from the opening line: 'I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.' But didn't he mean: 'Seated in an office, I am surrounded etc.'?
Other examples, skimming down the page: '...delays need of any response from me' [instead of 'saves me the trouble of a response']; 'their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle...' [instead of 'mottled']; 'I compose what I project will be seen as a smile' [instead of 'expect']; '...the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront' [This sentence.]; '...a tiny piping voice that's absurd coming out of a face this big' [instead of 'incongruous,' etc., a favorite word in this book, along with 'ellipse']; 'The huge window gives out on nothing more than dazzling sunlight...' [for 'gives onto']; 'In this new smaller company the Director of Composition seems abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate etc.' [instead of 'been actualized,' but the rest is so awful I don't know what to say]; '...outraged that I'm being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency Room against my will and interests' [better to be needlessly ambulanced when you're all for it]; 'He never asked a person again once he'd told them this, because he was proud, and also kind, and wouldn't put anyone in that kind of contradictory position' [instead of 'complicated'/'complicitous']; 'The clicks of his portable clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, movement, and readjustment' [a fun idea but why not liftoff, flight, and landing]; '...firmly, terribly emblazoned in his memory' [instead of burned, seared, stamped etc.]; 'Isn't that a pejorative clause?' [for 'expression']; and so on.
So I'm flipping a bit through the first few pages, but that kind of gives a sense of what you're working with, line by line and down to the individual word. He's better in the short stories, but even there it's slow-going.
Anyway I'd really like to know what other people think.
I hadn't read him until picking up Brief Interviews with Hideous Men the other week. The last two stories were fine. This afternoon I opened up Infinite Jest, and read about 50 pages before setting it down and pouring myself a glass of water. I was thirsty.
----
Hearing what you hear. A few weeks ago, a stranger told me that she liked to write, and she thought, frowning to herself, that there might be something theatrical about that, something egotistic, she wasn't sure.
Too much ego or none at all? I asked.
I hope none at all.
I said I thought it was interesting that the 'outdoor' voice we hear on a recording, if we're unused to it, sounds like a thin knockoff of the 'indoor' voice we know. We learn that we have to play with the acoustics a bit when learning to speak publicly, and over time we get the knack of how to speak outdoors, begin to notice some of the outdoor sounds in our indoor voices, and adjust ourselves to those when we have to. Singing is different: here we've always been more than we are, too much ourselves. Ever had a speech impediment?
It's gone.
----
Unseeing what you see. Artless exercises. I think it was Ernst Mach who once sat down on a couch and drew himself without a mirror. How am I to myself, really? he asked himself. He (Malkovich?) closed his right eye and drew a few wisps of a white beard, first, no head, no neck, and then one large sleepy-looking shoulder off to the left. The rest of the body from the chest to feet, small, foreshortened, curves away and -- disappears like a rabbit into the weeds on the other side of the house.
----
As for IJ, what to say. Even next to Hideous Men it reads like juvenilia. Found myself scratching over the page with a capped pen, every other sentence, just to keep myself going, and this started from the opening line: 'I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.' But didn't he mean: 'Seated in an office, I am surrounded etc.'?
Other examples, skimming down the page: '...delays need of any response from me' [instead of 'saves me the trouble of a response']; 'their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle...' [instead of 'mottled']; 'I compose what I project will be seen as a smile' [instead of 'expect']; '...the facial creases of the shaggy middle Dean are now pursed in a kind of distanced affront' [This sentence.]; '...a tiny piping voice that's absurd coming out of a face this big' [instead of 'incongruous,' etc., a favorite word in this book, along with 'ellipse']; 'The huge window gives out on nothing more than dazzling sunlight...' [for 'gives onto']; 'In this new smaller company the Director of Composition seems abruptly to have actuated, emerged as both the Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate etc.' [instead of 'been actualized,' but the rest is so awful I don't know what to say]; '...outraged that I'm being needlessly ambulanced off to some Emergency Room against my will and interests' [better to be needlessly ambulanced when you're all for it]; 'He never asked a person again once he'd told them this, because he was proud, and also kind, and wouldn't put anyone in that kind of contradictory position' [instead of 'complicated'/'complicitous']; 'The clicks of his portable clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, movement, and readjustment' [a fun idea but why not liftoff, flight, and landing]; '...firmly, terribly emblazoned in his memory' [instead of burned, seared, stamped etc.]; 'Isn't that a pejorative clause?' [for 'expression']; and so on.
So I'm flipping a bit through the first few pages, but that kind of gives a sense of what you're working with, line by line and down to the individual word. He's better in the short stories, but even there it's slow-going.
Anyway I'd really like to know what other people think.