What do you think about this DFW?
classic, similar to stuff in vollmann's rainbow stories
>>7579648
Remove last sentence, and actually make some kind of point instead
>>7579657
That last sentence... I don't get it at all.
>>7579686
>three people
>now did one is repeated three times
was that difficult?
>>7579686
One never knew, [Talking about how someone in a situation wouldn't be able to comprehend it] after all, now did one now did [Saying that after being disproved wrong because eventually the small percentage of it actually happening where it would seem unlikely to happen has happened] one now did one. [Talking about how that the person who was the outlier and found out what others couldn't now followed the ambition that (others couldn't)]
That's my take on it.
>>7579697
you're doing the author a disservice by overthinking his work
>>7579657
Kek. DFW is critique thread tier
DFW, Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, etc, all these shitty middle brow writers need to be forgotten. I'm sick of seeing cheap cliches in literature.
>>7579648
Last sentence - EDIT OUT. Pretty nice otherwise. I want to read more.
I am American, nationality that, to my shame, is the same as DFW’s. You want to know what is the problem with David Foster Wallace? Here's the problem:
>a) As a writer.
He is a writer whose books deal only with self-help themes, first world problem topics, sincerity and especially depression (a lot of depression). David Wallace writes what male humanities students in general (and we all know that male humanities students do not have anything remarkable in the mental department) want to hear: he talks about the power of addiction; about irony and how ironical everyone has become; about things like “if you really feel depressed, than nobody will understand that for nobody in the whole universe can understand that you are living the worst things imaginable [go tell that to famished kids who wish with all their souls, with all the juices in their bodies, the heat in their blood and marrows to just get something to eat]”; he speaks that everyone can be earnest (usually by just wanting to and but so); he pseudo-philosophizes about life before death; talks about his own “experiences” with drugs and tennis, and so on. In other words: he is just a mix between a self-help writer and an overgrown teenager.
1/2
>>7579733
>He is a writer whose books deal only with self-help themes,
Honestly there would be nothing wrong with this if he had not been so immature emotionally. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Sterne, even Nabokov, pulled this shit off. He leaves nothing to the reader and assumes that the profoundest human thoughts can be formed into declarative sentences.
>>7579733
>go tell that to famished kids who wish with all their souls, with all the juices in their bodies, the heat in their blood and marrows to just get something to eat
>muh kids in africa
>>7579733
>b) As a human being.
David Wallace is a despicable person. In reality he is a fraud that poses as some kind of saint and messiah (and anyone with half a neuron knows what messiahs are made with). Some examples of the glorious life achievements of this fellow: when he was on tour he hit the audience pussy and put his penis in as many young mothers' vaginas as possible; in his youth he was also just an insecure and talentless, a wet-behind-the-ears and overly sweaty tennis player (his surname, Wallace, is the name of the Sootopolis City Gym Leader in Pokemon Ruby, which is appropriate, since this gym is all about water-type pokemon), but today he loves to tell readers about how he was "drunk" and "stoned" in this days of youth, and that he was able to fight addiction, sober up and, after long years of toil, changed himself into a much more spiritual and enlightened being. He says he can't control his perspiration and that's why he has to put a bandana and stuff like that (now, anyone who makes such claims is either insufferable or a fraud, and Wallace’s eyes look too much like the eyes of a dead-fish to indicate that he actually suffers from being soaked in water – what remains is charlatanism). In fact you cannot see an interview with David Wallace without wanting to vomit with his air of autism and the cringing-look. He once became obsessed with a woman who wasn't interested in him and got a tattoo of her. When they were undergoing an affair, he once threw a table at her. Wallace tried to push her out of a moving car (hiss reasons were that he through that such a putative and high-kinetic approach, a kind of shock therapy, could help him). David Wallace (in a biography written about him) appears to be statutory raping female students, getting sued for plagiarism and giving interviews about a meet with hideous men that never happened. He is, in short, a bad character.
He is that typical character of American-atheist morals: that kind of people who talks about good and sincerity and morals and reading Kafka but that are constantly acting like lecherous chauvinists and TV spectators. You know, the 2 things that the books in Wallace have in greater quantity are literature and TV: this is the typical contradiction of this kind of culture. People rant about entertainment and the society of the spectacle that will conduct you to spiritual coma and think that it is a big sin to be passive watchers, but this same people, after reading and writing, will go to the couch and watch TV, and sweat, and lie, and cheat, etc.
>>7579772
>(his surname, Wallace, is the name of the Sootopolis City Gym Leader in Pokemon Ruby, which is appropriate, since this gym is all about water-type pokemon)
I'm disgusted that this sentence makes me like you more.
>>7579772
OP asked what you thought of "this" DFW, as in the story (which is "a DFW") - not what you thought of DFW himself (who, although he might be said in the strictest sense to be "a DFW", is not "this" DFW)
>>7579770
source pls
So: he had the temerity to write about issues that concerned his own country and class rather than about starving kids in Africa, and he was sometimes a jerk. Gotcha.
What are the best novels by starving children?
>>7579772
>trying to roast DFW
>being this buttblasted over a dead author
