What DFW should i read first?

IJ.

why bother reading someone who couldn't even live with himself. the only sincere moment in the life of David Foster wallace was when he kicked away the chair. the rest of his life was a lie, the new sincerity was a joke whose punchline was the creaking of a leather belt around the rafter.his literary career was a menagerie of self help lies told to keep his depression at bay. the audience pussy and drugs were the ghosts at that feast of hypocrisy. the depression was warranted because behind all the gimmicks and the self awareness and the bandannas was no discernible talent

>>9407040
this should be in the sticky

>>9407021

Between those two, IJ, but think about reading some of his non-fiction and/or short stories first. Overall I'd say A Supposedly Fun Thing is the best essay collection, but Consider the Lobster is very good too. Both Flesh and Not has the great Roger Federer essay but overall is a posthumous cash-grab. Oblivion is a very good story collection, Brief Interviews is too (apparently), and Girl with Curious Hair is not.

Why does everyone pretend Broom of the System doesn't exist?

>>9407086
because it sucked

>>9407021
a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again. u must learn to tolerate wallace in small doses before you go big

good old neon is the best place to start with his fiction in my opinion. if you like it, read IJ

>>9407021
Please listen to me OP. You need to read e pluribus unum before anything else. It is the key to understanding the rest of his work. It is DFW's critique of pure reason in the foundational sense.

Broom is very funny and a good start. Then read E Pluribus and after that Infinite Jest. Read his short The Depressed Person from BIWHM, but only that one, and the read Oblivion. Finish with The Pale King. The rest of his fiction can be ignored, the rest of his non-fiction can really be read anytime.

>>9407040

I love this board sometimes.

>>9407086
>>9407242

But Broom is Wallace at his most 'Look at me and how clever I am'. It was a thesis after all and not even meant for public consumption
>tfw I had to click on like 18 storefronts that time

Honestly, I started with a collection of his essays, then moved on to The Pale King, which changed my life. I couldn't imagine starting out with Infinite Jest.

Actually, scratch that, I tried reading Infinite Jest a couple years prior, when I was young and just feeling my way through this "literature" thing, and I dropped it after 20 pages.

>>9407021
I took a creative nonfiction course with David Wallace at Ponoma back in '94. We weren't allowed to show anyone our essays outside of the class for some reason. He seemed naturally intelligent, didnt need to look at any notes or textbooks or prepare for any lectures, he just knew his stuff and was super casual.

I saw him talking to a girl on campus one day. He uncharacteristically wore a Fila sweatsuit, the kind that looks like it's made from the same material as parachutes, and trainer sneakers with a matching bandana. That was his pussy hunt outfit apparently. Several times a week, same outfit, I'd see him hitting on women in it. I once saw him wearing it while carrying an identical outfit from the dry cleaners, he had like 4 sets of same Fila sweatsuit.

I asked him about it in class and he said we aren't allowed to discuss anything unrelated to class while inside class, the same way we can't show anyone outside of class our essays. A student called out "but Dostoevsky isn't in this class and last week you talked about replicating his black tea obsession to test its affects on your own writing". Wallace stared blankly at the student with dead eyes for 30 seconds in dead silence then said "you just got knocked down a full letter grade. Any other smart asses? Didn't think so." and pushed up his glasses with his index finger.

I remember telling myself this guy will either be super successful or kill himself.

>>9407021
Reader Infinite Jest first. Just dive in. Literature isn't a fucking RPG.

>>9407680
>But Broom is Wallace at his most 'Look at me and how clever I am'.

Nah, that would be Girl With Curious Hair. That one is insufferable.

>>9407040

>why bother reading someone who couldn't even live with themselves
>Hemingway
>Woolf

>>9407021
nothing

he was a rich kid and a teacher's pet who made a literary career of overusing a thesaurus and kissing academic ass

the most unoriginal writer of the 20th century. never thought for himself. never took a risk with his writing.

TPK > IJ

>>9408572
t. Bret Easton Ellis

>>9407086
i dont know, i actually really liked it.
>>9407168
>>9407021
I'd say start with either a supposedly fun thing or broom of the system.

how do we not have an unironic DFW chart?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KATfU2wZ6o&feature=youtu.be

bump2

>>9408572
Generally true. I hate the substance of his writing more than any of this, though. It's so pampered and suburban. I can't bring myself to care about characters who are "addicted" to TV.
What a fucking non-problem.

>>9407808
How did the Pale King change your life?

>>9407040
Amazing

>>9410750
Kek, how do you fuck this up so bad

>>9408572
>never took a risk
>everyone hates him

>>9410777

Basically got me more interested in that whole vein of writing, where big ideas and contradictions are at the heart of the medium, where the focus is on a place and a community, rather than just people and their emotions and literary stylistics.

It seems like a lot of contemporary literature has forgotten or spurned these values. Writers are shitting on the best aspects of their medium and trying to be more like poets. Novels can and should be about world-building and schemes and word games and zaniness and unpredictability, and reading The Pale King got me locked into this kind of aesthetic (along with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again). I'd never read Pynchon or Delillo before this, so I didn't know that a novel could be so maximalist, so wild and so much fun. I was more or less heading down the same path outlined above, except that I had read Yukio Mishima and Raymond Carver instead of Toni Morrison and Alice Munro.


With The Pale King, the focus is on the tax building, the codes and struggles that breathe life into it, and the way complex, bureaucratic systems intersect with day-to-day, lived experience. It's a story of a place and a community, it's something much bigger than just your average drama. This makes similar to Infinite Jest, except I find The Pale King to be tighter, funnier and more profound.

Right now, I'm starting Don Delillo's Libra and it's giving me the same general vibes. I'm expecting great things from this book too.

>>9408523
your point being? they're both absolute trash

>>9407040
It's people like you that have made /lit miserable.
Who fucking cares? It's escapism, he wrote fiction. Who gives a shit what the guy did in his daily life? or how he ended it?
Not every book has to be a masterpiece, you should learn to read for enjoyment and stop giving so much of a shit about authors' personal lives. You're the type of person who likes to tell people about the intelligent books you read.
You take the fun out of reading, fuck off.

>>9413491
>hurr durr reading is just my fun play pretend time anyone who enjoys it for any other reason or criticizes my thoughtless drifting existence is a bully
cry more, reddit. DFW sucked and he realized it and killed himself. this is me telling you that you suck. you're stupid and I genuinely hope you kill yourself

>>9407021
OPTIMAL STRAT

300 Pages of Infinite Jest
The Pale King
The rest of Infinite Jest

>>9413439
Who's not thrash?

>>9407021
Just read Good Old Neon, it's all you need

>>9410750
you sound serious. surely you can't be this retarded?

>>9413491

>have made /lit miserable.

/lit/ was always miserable. 4chan has always been miserable. Don't delude yourself otherwise. 4chan is the internet hate machine. Always has been, always will be.

/lit/ is entirely negative - you'll see a very rich vocabulary of hatred and contempt, and you'll even occasionally see a post of real passion, but never joyous passion - it's always hateful passion. Just look at the post you responded to. Whenever people here try to articulate why they like something, they'll be incapable of producing more than a laconic couple of impotent adjectives, the most common one being "amazing". I invite anyone to try and trawl through the catalog - see how few threads and posts are about enjoyment of literature, and note the poverty of the language used to express it.

This, of course, is why /lit/ finds DFW so interesting and divisive. He called us all out on it. Some are saddened by the fact that even in the context of anonymity and impermanence, no one dares to speak about the things they enjoy out of fear of being called banal. On the other hand, some consider DFW a huge faggot who did the world a favor by killing himself.

>>9414876
This was solid.

>>9414876
there are people on here who definitely have joyous passion for stuff; the problem, more than anything, is that our vocabulary (and by "our" here I mean /lit/, 4chan, this particular segment of the Internet mindset, and Western society in general to varying degrees) for joyous passion is incoherent meaningless unfamiliar awkward non-specific etc. We have a vocabulary for skepticism, criticism, disdain, etc that is both wider and conceptually richer than our vocabulary for passionate joyousness. There's no real conceptual account of passionate joyousness - it's mostly just an experience. This is true for an extremely wide spectrum of reasons. DFW tries to offer a number of such accounts and succeeds to varying degrees. Unfortunately, even if you have a reasonably satisfactory account, it tends to have a difficult time surviving the social pressure and struggles, and will mostly be adopted by people who suck in various ways.

S T A R T W I T H T H E G R E E K S

>>9407040
Lol that's the point of reading DFW. His an hero was one of the most productive suicides in the modern era. Second only to like hitler maybe. You just described the attraction of reading DFW.

>>9413439
>wolf
>trash

how many levels of irony are you on my man

>>9416007
Stfu

>>9414667

I found that story pretty redundant after Brief Interviews. Good Old Neon is already 95% there.

>>9416481
that's nice

>>9416284
>woman
>not completely trash
????

>>9407040
>>9413491
>>9414876
>>9415592
Thread should be archived just for these four posts

File: 1478149286135.gif (4MB, 500x282px) Image search: [Google]

4MB, 500x282px

>>9407822
I want to believe...

>>9407040
saved

>>9407822

>Fila sweatsuit pussy hunt outfit

I find this so fucking funny.

Only read IJ. Anyone who thinks other DFW is worth reading is kidding themselves.

>>9407021
>The Pale King first
what the fuck is wrong with you?

>>9414876
You're being silly.

People have always been and always will be attracted to, in a paradoxical way, more to anger and hatred and bitterness than to joy. People are more interested in suffering and cynicism than idealism. I'm not even being cynical.

Just look at works of art. Dante's Inferno is remembered much much more than the Purgatorio and Paradiso; in fact, they're hardly ever mentioned compared to the Inferno. Either you hear it as The Divine Comedy as a whole, or just as the Inferno.

Look at Gogol's Dead Souls, which he similarly meant to structure on the Divine Comedy; he could only complete the first part, and found himself at a loss to write the other parts, found that they were lacking in vitality.

This is because parodying Chichikov and the world he lives in, portraying Chichikov as an amiably, pleasantly corrupt although funny man, and criticizing the people around him, is much more entertaining and interesting and funny and maybe even easier than redeeming him and the people around him in a way that's interesting.

>>9418905
This is not about idealism.It's about taking or not the position that says things are worst. By saying everything is shit you automatically place yourself in a position of superiority to most people. You imply there's something they don't get that you do.
It's intelectually lazy and allows you to never wet yourself and state your position.

Read some of his short pieces (primarily This Is Water) to get an idea of what his writing's like, and then if you're interested, dive right into Infinite Jest.

>>9419311
You misunderstand me. I'm just saying people have more fun on the internet being negative, critical, and generally arguing against things rather than praising them.

>>9407021
IJ is terrible
Havent read pale king, heard it is a lot better
such a pretentious fag, honestly.