Wallace, David Foster

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great
He'd be a killer lawyer
Consider the (new) Reader
Moral clarity: a sign of Wallace's maturing
Not Perfect, but Awfully Good

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
David Foster Wallace
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0316156116

Book Description

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humor? What is John Updikes deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious nonfiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talk show featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that looks good only on the radio.

Customer Reviews:

great.......2007-05-19

David Foster Wallace is good at delving into the imponderable. I particularly enjoyed his book about the history of the contemplation of infinity (Everything and More). Here he takes on similarly heady topics, with some lighter themes mixed in.

One standout is the title essay, which explores the issue of animal sentience, the question being whether the inner life of a lobster is anything remotely like the inner life of a human. There is simply no answer to this question, and philosophers who have tackled the question in recent years have bungled it extremely badly. Consequently the most one can do is to contemplate the implications of certain answers, and DFW's essay on the topic is as good as any I've come across.

Perhaps the only thing more impenetrable than the mind of a lobster is the mind of John McCain. Here's a guy who is so principled that he apparently refused to be released from a P.O.W. camp because it violated the letter of military policy. Yet he can be seen regularly cowtowing to the likes of Jerry Falwell and G.W. Bush just to gain a few points with the lunatic fringe of the religious right. DFW followed McCain during the 2000 campaign, and his essay comes as close as is logically possible to explaining how these various attitudes can inhabit the same brain.

DFW's writing style is not for everyone. If you're a fan of Hemingway you might find that it makes your head hurt.

He'd be a killer lawyer.......2007-04-09

This is the first collection of essays that I have read, and lu Dictionnaire universel de poche

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Dictionnaire universel de poche
Authors: Philip-Lorca DiCorcia
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Le Livre de Poche
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ringtone88.com ghostwritten autobiography of Tracy Austin moves former tennis sub-star Wallace to muse about its laconic dullness: could this not represent the inner drive, the absolute non-verbal total state of concentration that the superstar athlete can enter and so triumph over their nervous opponent? John Updike's turgid 'Toward the End of Time' contrasts its narcissism with Wallace's refutation of its 'bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants to is a cure for human despair.' Kafka's ambivalent wit resists reduction even as it can be summed up in the ultimate joke: 'the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.'

[A brief aside: in the American usage essay, Wallace correctly castigates theory-addled academics, but his footnote only gives the newspaper secondary citation for a source that looks-- lots of "carceral" blather-- to be another Marxian jeremiad from (perhaps an acolyte of?) Angeleno apocalyptic Mike Davis; Wallace needed to credit the primary author of this excerpt of the worst scholarly boilerplate award circa 2003.]

His long investigation into American usage leads Wallace into a realization that the SNOOTs (his acronym) who obsess over proper standards reveal the lie that so many Americans are taught: contrary to our attitude of populist reverse snobbishness, conventions do matter after all. Despite our American 'we're all just folks' insistence that class does not count (in both the schoolish and the economic applications), Wallace reminds us that, like it or not, we are judged by how (and if) we handle English in a somewhat competent fashion.

The news footage of 9/11 leads Wallace into an uncomfortably epiphany: those who fly the planes hate not the America of his gentle elderly female neighbors nearly as much as the macho, aggressive, self-aggrandizing America he and his fellow younger men represent. A trip with John McCain inspires an essay far too long, but which hammers away at the complacency that, contrary to rhetoric, the parties in power love to sustain and churn up: keep politics dull, sanctimonious, and so repulsive that voters will stay away in droves and all the incumbents will be all the more secure come election day. McCain, whose Vietnam torture Wallace describes movingly (and which I, contrary to his assumptions, knew nearly nothing about beyond the fact he was a POW for five years), drives Wallace into an impossible predicament. Is McCain calculated in his public persona or is he genuine, and where does one end and the other begin if one is an intelligent candidate in the public eye for months on end? On a lighter note, any writer who can link the Hanoi Hilton to the mundane torment more familiar to the rest of us as a chain motel deserves kudos. The essay is wearying in its detailed itineraries, but after a while you enter a Zen state akin to that of stupor on the campaign trail, which may be its sly intent.

The title essay similarly challenges moral assumptions held if not often examined by most Americans. If PETA is right that 'Being Boiled Hurts,' how does this pertain to boiling lobsters for our gustation? Why do we kill other creatures? How do we justify doing so? Can we question our habits without ending up equating rats with pigs with each other? Writing for Gourmet, 'the magazine of good living,' Wallace honestly scrutinizes the uncomfortable truths about the need that drives us to consume animal and fish and bird flesh-- that most of us every day when we eat likely choose not to consider. He does this without sounding preachy or pompous, and ends his essay just in time, I suppose, about this difficult subject.

Joseph Frank's studies of Dostoevsky are interpolated with Wallace's own précis of the philosophical quandries his reading of D. conjures up. These, again, illustrate Wallace's growing sophistication in tackling the tough questions, the existential angst we feel, especially as we age. Wallace conveys the core of Dostoevksy's thought. Wallace deftly draws us into the limning of our own circle of responsibility, where we find the sheer impossibility to separate our selfishness from our altruism, and laments our lack, in today's writers, of any serious successor to D's own 'morally passionate, passionately more fiction' that somehow manages to be realistic and convincingly human.

Finally, in the interminable if intermittently interesting 'Host,' among many other issues around the supposedly populist voices of AM talk radio, Wallace does raise relevant questions. Why do so many on the left lack the cohesion and the passion with which conservative pundits can express their ideas? Why do the chattering classes hold the flyover states in such contempt? In blurring moral and cultural critiques with political right-wing lobbying, how do talk-shows promote the status quo rather than truly upending an unjust status quo? And, how much do these pundits pander as corporate shills for all sorts of products pitched to play into their listener's fears, credulity, and loneliness? He also challenges us to imagine why, beyond the stereotypes, many listeners to such shows may well be right (no pun) in their judgement that-- as the first essay showed us with porn that itself seems to have no taboos left to its voracious market expansion except the (so far) off-limit snuff films-- America has drifted away from a moral center-- however hypocritical or distorted, standards did once hold sway-- into debauched cultural permissiveness.

Wallace wearies this reader, but he does make me think harder about such issues. He goads us by his presentation of the material, and irritates our complacent expectations of how passive readers should be. The author has done more work here than the usual journalist. It may look undisciplined, but it is carefully-- if rather too generously for our patience-- constructed. Wallace kicks out the chair from under us, and makes us scurry about his pages as if they scurried away from a Kafkaesque typesetter.

The book jacket inside cover blurb trumpets this book as funny, as if to assure the cowed reader that all the footnotes won't be too scary. Yetl amidst the flash of the rather undisciplined form, the content does contain sustained depth. His jacket photo studiously expresses Wallace's wish-- as he says in the usage article-- to be able to blend incognito with the rural midwesterners of his childhood. He does strike the requisitely grubby pose. But, as he admits, he also carries his parents' own elevated (and at times snobbish-- but in a good way!) expectations that we everyday people live up to our potential intellectually and ethically. I know this is not the same as "uproariously funny," but in the tradition of Tom Wolfe, Mencken, or Gore Vidal, Wallace combines his own stint in the ivory tower with long treks across the lands where lurk the rest of us, the great unwashed.

He admonishes us, himself included, to live up to what America and our own abundant resources allow us to profit from: the exertion of our minds for the betterment of our souls. Not a flag-waver, but nonetheless another prophet awakening us from our malaise. I wish the press promoters would have advertised this morality supporting Wallace's social criticism. Perhaps his own essays will draw more writers-- and better yet readers-- towards the serious examination of cultural and moral trends that Dostoevsky might have expected us to continue.

Not Perfect, but Awfully Good.......2006-11-04

I've never read Wallace, mostly because his best known work ("Infinite Jest") is so long. But I tend to like writers that digress and use footnotes for asides, so I thought maybe this collection of ten essays would give me enough of a taste to know if I should check out his other stuff. Ranging in length from 7 to 80 pages, the essays all appeared previously (albeit often truncated) in various magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Premier, etc. They can be roughly categorized into three categories: brief review, personal piece, and long in-depth topical examination.

The brief reviews generally tend to take an item and use it as a staging area for discussing something more interesting than the given subject. For example, in "Certainly the End of Something or Other", Wallace uses his review of John Updike's novel Toward the End of Time to highlight the general narcissism and shallowness of writers such as Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. His 20-page review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky is largely dedicated to making a larger point about literary criticism, and his 25-page review of tennis player Tracy Austin's autobiography is similarly dedicated to identifying the fundamental problem of sports memoirs. I have to admit that the essential point of the shortest piece, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness", eluded me.

The two more personal pieces are strikingly different, but in each one gets a vivid impression of Wallace working through his own feelings. In, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's", he uses 13 pages to recount his own September 11 experience in Bloomington, Indiana. As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating. The titular story is ostensibly a standard travel piece on a Maine lobster festival, but rapidly evolves into a thoughtful meditation (with scientific research) on the ethics of preparing and eating lobster.

The four in-depth essays are the real stars of the book, in each Wallace gets deep into his material and wallows in it with intellectual vigor and above all, wit. In the 50-page "Big Red Son", he covers the porn Oscars and emerges with scenes and quotes so surreal they must be true. Over the course of the 50-page "Authority and American Usage", he takes a topic close to his heart as a writing instructor and provides a layman's overview of the Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist "usage wars". The underbelly of political campaigning is exposed in the 80-page "Up Simba", detailing his week on the John McCain's 2000 campaign trail -- the ultimate lesson is that if you want the most astute and nuanced political analysis, turn to the camera and sound techs, not the journos. Finally, the 70-page "Host" takes us into the world of talk radio, via a profile of an LA radio personality. All of these long pieces are wonderful (albeit in very different ways), as they allow Wallace's intellect the space to range free and elaborate.

Ultimately, it's not hard to see why Wallace is a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award-winner. His combination of smarts, thoughtfulness, self-awareness, wit, and ability to write killer prose simply can't be ignored. One does have to raise an eyebrow at his overuse of footnotes, however. While I'm a big fan of footnotes (yes, even in fiction), I find Wallace's use of footnotes within footnotes rather tiresome (not to mention tough on the eyes). In many instances, it seems like the material could have been handled much more elegantly within the text, or within a parenthetical. This is especially true of "Host", which is very nearly ruined by the attempt to use boxed text and arrows to replace footnotes. There's no textual reason for the method, and the experiment doesn't work at all, only serving to highlight the unnecessary divisions of information and reducing their navigability.

Although a few of the pieces failed to totally captivate me, and the overfootnoting grated (especially in it's final iteration), this is still a highly entertaining and enlightening book. Chuck Klosterman's essays are like potato chips -- yummy, hard to stop at just one, and not super filling. Wallace's are generally a full nutritious meal at your favorite restaur Atlas nature : les champignons

Atlas nature : les champignons

Atlas nature : les champignons
Catalog: Book
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Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Atlas
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Livres:

ringtone88.com mg src="http://www.bill88.com/images/stars-5-0.gif" width="64" height="12" alt="5 out of 5 stars" border="0"> This book legitimately changed my life.......2007-04-21

For the better?? who knows? No book has had a bigger effect on my view of the world, the struggle for happiness, and overall what makes us HUMAN. Parts of the book are very very funny but it is dripping and oozing with sadness. It will hit everyone different ways (I admit some may reject it completely and find the prose tiresome) but it is in my mind the greatest book I have ever read.

Mind bogglingly good.......2007-04-20

Let's get a few things out of the way about Infinite Jest. Is it an easy read? No, it's not, but it's far from impenetrable and once you get into it, I.J.'s a hard book to put down. Does the plot resolve itself in a satisfying narrative conclusion? No, it doesn't, but if you read books simply for plot don't even bother trying to read Infinite Jest. Is it bloated and pretentious? Perhaps (particularly the 100 pages of footnotes), but that's what makes it so fun. So what's so good about it? Let me put it to you this way - once I finished reading it two days ago, I honestly feel like I have just come off an intellectual acid trip that has made me look at the world, addiction, our collective need to find contentment, what a novel can do, and tennis in a whole new, enlightened way. As well, the novel's a roller coaster emotionally as it is alternately hilarious and harrowing, is astounding in it's endlessly creative narrative structure and multiple narrators, and to top it off D.F.W.'s prose and dialogue are a true pleasure to read, . Infinite Jest is a commitment for the four to six weeks required to read it, but for anyone who enjoys a serious literary marathon it's well worth the challenge.

Some of the best writing the world has ever had, but..........2007-03-02

Saying this is a masterpiece is like saying Simon is mean. (You know it or have heard it even if you have never come in contact with either.) David Foster Wallace has a way with words that I can't yet describe. Yet, there is much wrong with this book.

It is not the oft commented upon length. Yes, it is too long but only because it feels like it should have been edited.

It is not the lack of an ending. It doesn't need one.

It is not the footnotes. They are amusing and a welcome change from the formulaic fiction that is out there.

It is a combination of those three things and the cult of Infinite Jest that make this unsatisfying IMHO.

It, like skydiving or running a marathon, is something that many people feel the need to do at some point in their lives. Like those things, I say have at it. But like them, when it is over you may just feel like the build up was better than the climax.

Still, a must read. I hope to someday get him at his (pared down) best.

Excellent.......2007-02-20

Mix equal parts Thomas Pynchon and John Irving with just a dash of Douglas Adams and you have the voice and sprawl of Infinite Jest. An excellent book for those not intimidated by heft - literary, intellectual or otherwise.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments Tag: Author of Infinite Jest

Average customer rating:

A Supposedly Good Book I'll Never Read Again
Like an amusing dinner guest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Keep Doing
"Existeniovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding": The Case for Lucidity
The title essay alone is worth the price (of course its over 100 pages by itself)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments Tag: Author of Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Manufacturer: Little, Brown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
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ASIN: 0316919896

Amazon.com

David Foster Wallace made quite a splash in 1996 with his massive novel, Infinite Jest. Now he's back with a collection of essays entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. In addition to a razor-sharp writing style, Wallace has a mercurial mind that lights on many subjects. His seven essays travel from a state fair in Illinois to a cruise ship in the Caribbean, explore how television affects literature and what makes film auteur David Lynch tick, and deconstruct deconstructionism and find the intersection between tornadoes and tennis.

These eclectic interests are enhanced by an eye (and nose) for detail: "I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh . . ." It's evident that Wallace revels in both the life of the mind and the peculiarities of his fellows; in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again he celebrates both.

Customer Reviews:

A Supposedly Good Book I'll Never Read Again.......2007-02-21

I picked up this collection of Wallace's essays largely based on his reputation as one of America's young, "genius" writers, in the line of Franzen and Powers and while he amply demonstrates his exhaustive vocabulary and keen sense of observation, his selected subject matter is often mundane. The title essay, ultimate in the collection, recounting his 7-day Caribbean cruise, is by far the best work in the collection, but even it wonders off in the weeds with long passages of minutia that seem pointless except to demonstrate the author's verbal pyrotechnics. I find Wallace's signature stylistic trait, the liberal use of long digressive footnotes, to be distracting. Reading him is like browsing a Web page with numerous URL links to other far-flung pages, clicking on each link in sequence just to check out the reference and then navigating back to the original. By the time you get back, you've lost context and the author's original point -- rereading previous paragraphs often ensues. Suffice it to say, this 'two steps forward, one step back' reading experience is frustrating.

I'll rate this book a ***+ or ****- (since we don't get half stars) primarily based on the occasional nugget of wisdom or spot-on description Wallace sprinkles through his essays. It's certainly worth picking up, particularly a cheap remaindered copy, for the two or three decent essays in this set, since it's easy to skip the clunkers (like his visit to the state fair) and move onto the next piece.

Like an amusing dinner guest.......2007-02-11

You know those people who have everyone at your table laughing so hard they can hardly eat? Reading Wallace's essays is just like listening to one of them, complete with hysterically funny asides (long footnotes that will crack you up). Just don't try to read his stuff while eating. Oh, and check out his amazing piece on Roger Federer from last summer's New York Times magazine. You can find it on the Times website. It's worth a search.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Keep Doing.......2007-01-04

I discovered Wallace about a year ago, when "Consider The Lobster" came out. (My review of that book explains why.) I have yet to read his fiction; 1,000+ page novels scare the hell out of me, and if you, like me, are one of the great "silent majority" (please, don't start with me, I know where the term originated and I don't need your history lessons, for reasons that should become apparent below), of fiction readers who tend towards popular fiction rather than "literary" fiction, you know where I'm coming from.

But with "Consider the Lobster", I was enchanted, and I did what I mostly do best with current trends: try and catch up 10 years later; those of you who read this and are old will understand; those youngsters among you are already rolling their eyes,if they've survived to this point, but to those survivors I say Wait!

Normally, I'm a bit of a "snoot", like DFW confesses to being in CTL, but unlike him, I haven't the grammatical chops to identify the guilty culprit beyond a reasonable doubt--and far less to name him/her/it. I can only identify when something sounds right or wrong.

And along comes this guy who is a top-notch writer, or so they'd have me believe, who uses colloquial expressions like "like" and "you know", and all those horrible things we were taught to "eschew" (is that the ugliest word in the language or what? It sounds like someone hacking a loogie), and then follows them with pithy observations that are seemingly beyond his years.

This guy actually begins sentences with "And so but" without apology or apparent irony, for God's sake! But his observations, his reporter's eye for detail, are so sharp and telling, and his prose so bitingly clear, that one forgives the annoyances of his style (the footnotes: please don't get me started), and tolerates his wacky genius.

Could he be a better writer? Yes, of course. Could he be funnier? Yes, that too. Could he be both? Probably not, unless he were to undergo a Richard Pryorish running-down-the-street-on-fire thing, which I don't think any of us want to see. And if you do, you're really sick.

So why is this guy a great writer? He breaks most of the rules, certainly all the rules he disagrees with, and leaves in their wake the standard ( Yes, David, "standard", whether you like it or not) postmodern (what a godawful word, and one that he's thankfully avoided in his more recent writings -- don't remember seeing it once in CTL) excuse/reason "That's how my generation talks", and th Breton de lechiagat phonologie

Breton de lechiagat phonologie

Breton de lechiagat phonologie
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ringtone88.com le and humor) and the brillant essay on irony in the TV age.

But the other essays (on proffesional tennis, david lynch, "the death of the author" argument and other things) are well worth reading, even if they aren't quite as utterly brillant as the first three, and especially worth reading for anyone interested in their subject matter.

So if you like humorous journalism at all, do yourself a favor and buy this.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Average customer rating:

Clever but Reader-Friendly?

RIVETING PATTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS; NOT BRIEF, AND NOT ALWAYS HIDEOUS

Hats off to an innovator

Disgusting.

Ick. Not for me.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace
Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Amazon.com

Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out by the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd only slow down for a second.

The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don't have a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in this book), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenzied narratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interview transcripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender is revealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The Devil Is a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is human motivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of any self-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for five dollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse into modern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathing economy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with a haunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and the two darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead": <blockquote> It's going to send you someplace which its own length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. </blockquote> Of course, not every piece is an absolute winner. "The Depressed Person" slips from purposefully clinical to unintentionally boring. "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" reimagines an Arthurian tale in MTV terms and holds your attention for about as long as you'd imagine from such a description. Ultimately, however, even these failed experiments are a testament to Mr. Wallace's endless if unbridled talent. Once he gets the reins completely around that sucker, it's going to be quite a ride. --Bob Michaels

Amazon.com Audiobook Review

David Foster Wallace is one of those either-love-him-or-hate-him kind of writers, but most of the subjects in his collection are--as the title suggests--worthy of contempt. On this audiocassette, DFW, as he's known to his fans, reads a selection of his works from the book of the same name. The fictional "interviews" are brief forays into the minds of men via questions that are signaled with a verbal "Q," but never actually asked. While he reads those pieces in the voices of the interviewees, Wallace reads the rest of the collection--a handful of short stories--with the self-conscious lack of emotion commonly used by poets. Don't look for plot or action here; it's strictly character sketches with a good dose of verbal gymnastics. And don't expect to like most of the characters; it's clear the author doesn't either. (Running time: 3 hours, 2 cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

Book Description

An exuberantly acclaimed collectiontwenty-two stories that com-- bine hilarity and an escalating disquiet as they expand our ideas of the pleasures fiction can afford. Wallace was recently selected by Time as one of the four outstanding young American writers. The hardcover was a bestselleron the Independent, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller lists.

Customer Reviews:

Clever but Reader-Friendly?.......2007-06-07

As a writer, I found the craft utilized by David Foster Wallace intriguing. He really breaks out of what a standard "story" can be and is quite successful in a few of the pieces. I, however, did not enjoy much of what I read.

There is something to be said for being clever and being inventive but to put so many stories together in one collection limits the ability to take them all in and truly enjoy them. I think if this book had been cut in half I would have given it a better review, but the sheer number of non traditional stories was too overwhelming. In other words, I wanted more story and less creation.

RIVETING PATTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS; NOT BRIEF, AND NOT ALWAYS HIDEOUS.......2007-05-13

I am intrigued by reviewers who picked up a David Foster Wallace novel and expected to beat a crystal clear-cut confession out of it. Lamenting the lack of "a point" in just about any creation of this eccentric author is a bit lacking in ingenuity; it's like walking into a pub on the east end of London and griping about the lack of homely milkshakes.

The literature of Foster Wallace--and yes, it certainly is literature-- is not for everyone. Not in a lofty, philistine, I'm-So-Uppity sort of a way. Just in the sheer breadth and depth of its imagination. Just read the "Key Phrases" bit below the book title on this Amazon.com page here and you'll get a good sense of the Left-of-Center stuff to expect from these adroit little vignettes of the human mind, all 23 of them. There are four essays titled Brief Interviews with Hideous Men--which should dispel any misconceptions you may have about the book from its title--and all of them are sensational in their departure from the norm, from creative formatting to the effervescent use of language.

The first essay, A Radically Condensed History of the Postindustrial Life, is exactly 79 words. Guess you can even find it online if you try hard enough. But that's all the brevity you're going to get for the remainder of the book. Mind you, Wallace may write in long, really long, sentences, and his profuse footnotes would take Nicholson Baker to task. But "boring" is not an accusation he merits by any stretch of criticism (e.g., "More pu$$y than the toilet seat man. I shit you not").

For those who doubt his literary imagination, I only need to point to his essay "Datum Centurio" which is an at-first-confusing sliver of a specific dictionary, but when your tube light comes on, it comes on with mad respect for the author. Or the brilliant set of pop quizzes in "Octet" that describe interesting social situations from around the world and then pose tangential questions such as "Which one of them lived?" -- the question in and of itself forces a totally new dimension to the paragraph you had just finished reading and felt that you had understood. Then there's the throbbing spirit of "Adult World" where a young wife worries if her love-making with her new husband is stressful for his "thingie" -- an atavistic fear that is so beautifully drawn out, you almost feel like having a word with this woman.

Ultimately, the novel's misfits, losers, dreamers, and just plain good paranoid folk, get an affectionate if pensive frisking from the author's hands. It's provocative, witty, and very, very engaging. Don't like his stream of consciousness style of writing? Skip this one. But please don't ignorantly castigate something that is not in line with your own personal tastes.

Hats off to an innovator.......2007-01-17

The writer in me says: thank you.

The reader in me says: you sonofa****.

Disgusting........2005-12-07

I began reading this book quite a few years ago but elected to stop after forty pages. It is aimless, vile, and without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Be warned: this is one you'll be ashamed to put in the garage sale...if you don't decide to just set it up in flames and put it out of its misery first.

Ick. Not for me. .......2004-09-15

Supposed to be great. Critics loved it. So original. I thought it was boring and annoying. A collection of short stories about unlikable people, a lot of gibberish that was intentionally unintelligible. Which is fine for a while, but an entire book is too much. I really disliked it. I applaud any attempt to do something completely different, so I give it two stars instead of one, but jabbing knitting needles into my eye sockets would be different too, and I wouldn't like that much either.

Average customer rating:

Maybe don't bother.

Savagely intelligent a Lexique anglais/français d'électrotechnique

Lexique anglais/français d'électrotechnique

Lexique anglais/français d'électrotechnique
Authors: Jean-Louis Schlosser
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Ellipses Marketing
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ringtone88.com indulgent. Honestly, this sounds right up my alley, but it just didn't add up. The smartest kid at Choate just reenacted a Saturday Night Live skit ad nauseam for 3 hours -- some folks just laughed and laughed the whole time, but me, I got bored for substantial bits and was just waiting for the next gag. That said, some of the gags are great, and although he doesn't go deep, he has read just enough philosophy to keep me tantalized (at least for the first half of the book or so, before my sinking realization that this wouldn't go anywhere).

I also must speak to DFW's literary ancestors. Many reviews make the connection to Pynchon, but honestly I've never read a (published) author whose writing style screamed out so baldly: "I want to be So-and-So". DFW just reads like a desperately wannabe Pynchon so much I almost feel for the guy. He ain't Pynchon, but he's modelled himself so closely that it hurts and, for this reader, really undercut his own creativity. There are other writers who have stood on the shoulders of Pynchon (Neal Stephenson comes to mind first, there are others of course), but DFW is just trying to ape him. Too bad that he hasn't found his own authorial voice. This is his first novel, though, so perhaps he matures in later work? Not sure if I'm going to bother finding out.

what Wittgenstenian system?.......2005-09-01

Okay - this is not a literary implementation of "Wittgenstein's system" as I have read elsewhere, although he plays around with some pretty cool Wittgenstenian ideas in it... it is a whole lot like a shorter version of Infinite Jest in ways... I did in fact enjoy reading it, but I understand why DFosterW chose to write Jest in a way that more fully explores this literary stab. And hey - why is it that we human readers so expect our human writers to contrive plausible endings to all that is written anyways? I mean, it is weird enough that our eyes roam across these little symbols on a page and a voice goes and speaks in our head and tells us what is written, that's what's happening here, right, and that's weird, but what I'm really trying to get at is more like

I love DFW. I hate DFW. I love DFW........2005-08-23

I hate DFW. I love DFW. And so it goes. This appears to be the tenor of the reviews as well as the general reaction that David Foster Wallaces writing seems to induce. I became interested in reading the late 20th century "greats" and began with Infinite Jest. One hundred pages later, I was sufficiently confused and decided to back off and read some early or shorter works by my authors of interest. Thus, I read Delillo's Body Artist and DFWs Broom of the System. Despite the fact that DFW is clearly more intelligent than me, I managed to finish the Broom of the System. It is more approachable than Infinite Jest, funny, and entertaining. If you are new to DFW, I would say that this book has a similar "feel" as the films The Royal Tenenbaums or I Heart Huckabees. Is this a perfect book? No. Is the writing outstanding? Yes - but not completely perfected. Is the plot compelling? No - then The Historian and DaVinci Code are compelling but thats all they offer. What is it that makes this book worth 4 stars? It is simply DFWs ability to capture the irony and lassitude that characterized the youth zeitgeist of the late 20th century. He does this with humor and zest that are rarely matched. It may be DFWs lack of driving plot that makes people so frustrated. However, recall that the "Greatest American Novel," Moby Dick was panned commercially and critically when first published. Was Melville ahead of the collective curve? Probably. Is DFW also ahead of the curve? Given the equal number of people who dislike or love his writing, it is not unlikely. Either way, The Broom of the System offers an approachable starting point to one of the great writers of our time. March onward, Delillo, Wallace, and Pynchon.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries)

Average customer rating:

Math for Smarties (Both Informed and Un)
Infinity Explained
Not an explanation, a discussion
Challenging, thought-provoking, entertaining, and disappointing
Narrative of equations

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries)
David Foster Wallace
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Oblivion : Stories
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
The Broom of the System
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

ASIN: B000FUO0G0

Amazon.com

Before discussing the merits of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, it is essential to define what the book is not. This volume in the "Great Discoveries" series is not a history of the personalities and social conditions that led to the "discovery" of infinity. Nor is it a narrative fixated on the cultish fear of--and obsession with--the infinite that has seemingly driven mathematicians insane over the centuries. Rather, Everything and More is a surprisingly rigorous march through the 2000 plus years of mathematical research that began with Aristotle; continued through Galileo, Isaac Newton, G.W. Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and J.W.R. Dedekind; and culminated in Georg Cantor and his Set Theory. The task Wallace (author of the bestseller Infinite Jest and other fiction) has set himself is enormously challenging: without radically compromising the complexity of the philosophy, metaphysics, or mathematics that underlies the evolving concept of infinity, present the material to a lay audience in a manner that is entertaining. To propel his narrative, Wallace even develops a style that mirrors the mathematical language he probes. One difficulty in his focus on concepts and not a strict human chronology, though, is that his structure is dependent on frequent digressions (especially early on). Patience is required. Wallace demands that his reader walk through the equations, study the graphs and charts, and relearn college-level concepts to follow along on the exploration. Indeed, after one wrenching dip into Zeno's paradoxes, Wallace spouts at his imagined complaining audience: "Deal." But the book should be deemed a success. If one grants him the attention he requires, Wallace has made the trip richly rewarding. --Patrick O'Kelley

Book Description

The best-selling author of Infinite Jest on the two-thousand-year-old quest to understand infinity.

One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.

Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor's counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology.

Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

<B>About the series:</B> W. W. Norton and Atlas Books announce the launch of an exciting new series—Great Discoveries—bringing together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs—the great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world.

Customer Reviews:

Encyclopédie pratique de la chasse

Encyclopédie pratique de la chasse
Authors: Yves le Floc'h, Michel Durchon, Yves Ferrand
Catalog: Book
Media: Relié
Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Hachette Littérature
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ringtone88.com pianist--beautiful without knowing what's going on musically in the progression of notes, chord structures, etc.

I suppose understanding the still not comprehended math of infinity was supposed to be the point, but it need not be. Just as I don't need to be able to read music, much less a musical score, to enjoy listening to Bach, I had a peculiar, quasi-aesthetic experience reading this Story. I didn't need to understand it all. It's even okay with me if he was elaborately putting me on.

Girl With Curious Hair (Norton Paperback Fiction)
Average customer rating:

DFW, Fiction and DFW and Fiction

David Foster Wallace

Foster: a craftsman of the human language

An Entertaining Mixed Bag

Worth My Appearance alone...

Girl With Curious Hair (Norton Paperback Fiction)
David Foster Wallace
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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Binding: Paperback

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The Broom of the System

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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Oblivion : Stories

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

ASIN: 0393313964

Customer Reviews:

DFW, Fiction and DFW and Fiction.......2004-12-28

Okay, so here's the deal w/ DFW: the guy is extremely intelligent. he is also overtly aware of his intelligence and displays it all over the place. this bothers people. some things to remember and know about DFW: he was a philo. major as an undergrad; his first book was an investigation of the theories of ludwig wittgenstein, also an overly intelligent fellow and very hard to follow. Something else: in this collection of short-stories, the one titled "the girl w/ curious hair," DFW displays that he also knows one thing or another about fiction and that he has read a lot of it and doesn't like most of it. the title story, "girl w cur..." is a cool story is you think you like punks and nihilists and sado-masochism and other stuff, but it helps to know something about bret easton ellis's stuff, and to know that DFW hates (HATES!) BEE w/ some serious passion. Then there's the two stories about real-world characters, "little expressionless animals"--the opening piece, and i think it's pretty damn cool--and "lyndon" are investigations/explorations of using "real-world characters" (which for legal reasons has to be roundly denied) that was pioneered by the exceedingly weird and totally fun robert coover who wrote "the public burning" whose main character was richard milhouse nixon and was the first book to use a "RWC" as a protagonist. so there's that. then there's the piece of cathartic/psyhological diaglogue, in which DFW dips his fingers, there's "john billy" which is kind of a stab at faulkner but is also pretty cool and a really great read near the end (which i find is pretty true of most of DFW's stuff, it takes a while to build up and the guy is a straight-up bonafide (a word he hates) genius at bringing it all together and making you feel good when you finish a story). there's some other stuff in there (like "everything's green" which is only two pages but still isn't his shortest piece which was only like five lines, and both of those are cool). finally, there's the final fiction, a novella of about like 150 pages or something and it's all-over john barth (author of "the floating opera," "giles goat-boy" (which is way weird), "the sot-weed factor" and others) principally his exlposive collection of shorts, "lost in the funhouse." ytou should read that entire book (it's short) in order to really get what DFW is after in "westward the course of empire makes its way," and he's really after "metafiction," look it up. so this is all to say that DFW is writing fiction, and it's way cool fiction, well written and crafted, with interesting characters and solid "stories," but it is way helpful to know his sources. this kind of fiction--intertexual and in some ways needing a well-literary-read reader--is not for all. it's some damn fun stuff on it's own though. i recommend DFW to those w/ an interest in where "serious literary fiction" might be making it's way; to those who also enjoy and appreciate vollmann, powers, pynchon (seriously pynchon), gaddis, barth, maybe updike a little but not totally, and some other guys, yeah, mostly white males, but also cynthia ozick, whose fiction is slamming, especially her shorts which are hard to come by. so there's that, which is nice.

David Foster Wallace.......2004-07-13

David Foster Wallace is not the type of writer who writes for the mass-market reading public. That is by no means a bad thing. He is I guess what you would call a "writer's writer" -- a writer who is fashionable to study in your graduate creative writing classes at Brown, but all in all is not really that fun to read. I've just finished (more or less) his inordinately self-indulgent compendium of postmodern stories (oblique references to our blooming age of popular culture) that is Girl with Curious Hair. The collection has an auspicious beginning with a droll story of game show hosts and complicated lovers, then strays with the second story (about an Account Representative giving the Vice President of Overseas Production CPR--do I really care? Not enough to peruse it so as to grasp the implicit meaning). Then it gets back on track with the title story (one of the two good stories, not counting the first) in which an unlikely friendship cultivates between the apotheosis of 1980s yuppiedom and a group of nihilistic punks, a real treat. The other good story in this collection is My Appearance, which delineates a middle-aged television star's foray into the realm of late nate television mania--a smart and critical insight into the state of cynism in America. That was about all this book did for me, not really warranting the purchase price. I occasionally found Wallace's writing style witty and biting, but ultimately too bombastic and showy--ornamental to the point of shameless grandiloquence. I haven't read his much hallowed brainchild Infinite Jest, so David Foster Wallace hasn't rightly merited a particular partiality in me yet, but I'll try some more of his material before I give up on him. This book just did not work for me.

Foster: a craftsman of the human language.......2004-01-23

Unfortunately, there is a very real difference between those with a gift for manipulating the human language and good 'writers'. Continents of difference.

Wallace will often spend pages of deft and cynical description, and it takes the heaviness of the reader's eyelids to alert him to the fact that *nothing is happening*. Now, thinking something needs to be happening in fiction may be out of style among the Midwest creative writing programs this year, but all Foster seems to be communicating is "Look at me! I'm clever as you please!" Some of these stories almost feel like they began as one of his overly-written essays (once he spent twenty pages describing a tennis court, apparently in the belief all of his readers were Haitian refugees who only knew sugarcane fields) and then he added a few lines of dialogue.

The language is very pretty, but I have hand-carved pretty crystal things which aren't even decent paperweights. If only his fiction were about something besides poking fun at the writing of fiction!

It's something like literary self-gratification. It takes skill and effort, and it probably felt very good while he was doing it, but in the end he's left all alone, the only person who really knows the 'what' and 'why' of any of it.

An Entertaining Mixed Bag.......2002-08-03

I read Girl With Curious Hair after Infinite Jest, so I thought I had some idea of what to expect. The stories in this book are so different from one another, and from Jest, that I shall now review them separately.
Little Expressionless Animals-This story blended the absurd business of game shows perfectly with the absurd story of a savant lesbian and her autistic brother. This was probably my favorite story.
Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR- This story was the very crisp. It is short, and it is still detailed, but it is not an extravaganza like the others. It is a good story, though, and very clever.
Girl With Curious Hair- This story is hilarious and very perverse. My brother says it is pro-Republicanism, but I do not believe him. It may be too perverted for many people.
Lyndon- This is a good example of DFW's ability to recreate actual famous people. It is also a comment on the different kinds of love people have. I don't think that I understood it.
John Billy- John Billy is an excellent example of DFW's style. It is a simple story about the hometown hero Chuck Nunn Jr, told in a complicatedly Kansan dialect and with a bizzarre twist at the end.
Here and There- This is a story that I enjoyed very much. It is a dialectic account of the failure of a genius to love. It has an anti-ending similar to Infinite Jest, though, which many find troublesome.
My Appearance- This may be the best story in the collection. It explores the conflicting themes of sincerity/naivite and irony/cynicism. It also stars David Letterman.
Say Never- This story was about a man who cheats on his wife and then with his brother's girlfriend, and then confesses. It is told from his p.o.v., the brother's, and their mother's friend Labov. I didn't like this one that much, but the style is, as usual, amazing.
Everything is Green- Thi Malawi (en anglais)

Malawi (en anglais)

Malawi (en anglais)
Authors: Guide Bradt Publication
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Bradt Publication
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ringtone88.com OLOR="orange">Download Description

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousnessâÂ€Â”a combination that ilis dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way ("The Suffering Channel"). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring ("Oblivion").</br></br>Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate. Oblivion is an arresting and hilarious new creation from a writer "whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction"(Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Customer Reviews:

Best collection since Girl with Curious Hair.......2007-04-03

One of the most dense yet intriguing short story collection since Girl With Curious Hair. Here the caveat lector is of course the sterile (at times incredibly boring) build-up constructed purposively to cathart the denouement, and make as if the dialectic probing of the human condition, was somehow merit, or enlightening. This is distinctly Wallace. Distinctly wealthy, manipulative, and white.

The inclusion of clinical, statistical terminology, though sticks out like sore thumbs, even to medical professionals like myself.

Brilliant.......2006-12-21

The best collection of short fiction from the best living writer in the English language. It demands patience and attention, but the rewards for the effort are incredible. The best story in the collection is Good Old Neon, which is bifercated (by use of footnotes), such that there are two distinct endings, both of which would qualify the story as probably the best I have read this year.
These stories coil and bend, and the sentences are often labyrinthine; casual reading really won't suffice. If you do put forth the effort, I think you'll find that they engage the mind and that other thing, whatever it may be, that makes us what we call "human." Truly an outstanding collection.

I go back to it fairly frequently.......2006-05-18

Pissed off at the mindnumbing aspects of television, I found this collection of stories to be a breath of fresh air showing me the power and scope of what fiction writing can be when someone courageous enough will put in the work. You can trust Wallace to know what the heck he's writing about, just don't think too hard about it - like television - enjoy it and the words and ideas in each story will, in the end, make you glad you did, unlike television. I especially enjoy 'Good Old Neon' and 'Another Pioneer'.

Missing Something.......2005-10-24

First, let me say I absolutely LOVE reading David Foster Wallace. This collection showcases one of his strengths: the attention to detail - or, more accurately - the minutiae - of everyday thoughts; how, for example, three minutes of a day can only be captured by pages & pages & pages of prose, because the human brain simultaneously functions on so many levels (best illustrated when you find yourself listening to someone attempting to explain 'the dream I had last night' but use so many qualifiers that a dream that lasts for probably no more than one minute absorbs the conversation of an entire lunch - or as least smoke break).

Ultimately, though, I found myself wishing a strong editorial voice would have confronted Wallace on several counts prior to the publishing of 'Oblivion.' This is especially true with the first story, 'Mister Squishy,' which seems to build up to a crescendo that is never reached. Wallace weaves together several different narratives into what the reader expects to come together at some point, but instead the story just...ends.

'The Suffering Channel' is a lost opportunity of amazing proportions. In this story, a highly engaging tale begins - and the reader falls into it helplessly, increasingly curious as to what it all means and where it's all going. Yet, instead of reaching a conclusion, or really any sort of resting point, the story abruptly ends. I wondered if the printer had left out pages & pages of the book, and I fought against the urge to hurl it across the room.

I absolutely love Wallace's amazing & rare gifts. But what 'Oblivion' shows is a 'writer's writer.' These stories are partial projects, not stories. They are, at best, extremely well fleshed-out beginnings.

It's a joy to read the words of someone with such innate talent, with such incredible gifts with the written word, but to me what we're left with is just one-half of a whole. Most of these stories end so abruptly, one can scarcely even call them a 'slice of life' because they consistently refer to past or future events that are never quite clear or explained. It's not that I'm left frustrated because 'I want to know what happened.' I'm frustrated because what could have been three or four great full-length novels were robbed.

I will always read Wallace because it is an incredibly intense & enjoyable experience. But I probably would not recommend this book to anyone I know because it is so unfulfilling and ultimately disappointing.

I guess 'Oblivion' can be classified as 'experimental' fiction or non-narrative storytelling, but Wallace is capable of so much more than that, as we have seen in the past, as we will hopefully see in the future, & as even 'Oblivion' attests.

Something like an enema.......2005-10-21

I'm going to wait until it gets cold enough to burn this guy's book. "Oblivion," couldn't be a better title, while reading these stories--I couldn't actually bear to finish even one of them-- you feel as if you have entered some circle of Hell, and your punishment is to have to read all this crap. This guy makes me mad, his prose actually bores into your skull, it feels like torture to read and you want to say enough, yes, I will tell you anything you want to hear, but please just shut the blank up.

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present

Average customer rating:

Oldie but a Goldie
a bit outdated...but then again IS old...
Outdated but occasionally still insightful
an interesting look at what shapes our culture

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
Mark Costello , and David Foster Wallace
Manufacturer: Ecco Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries)
Oblivion : Stories
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David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)
The Broom of the System

ASIN: 0880015357

Customer Reviews:

Oldie but a Goldie.......2005-03-23< Open the Window, 1re. Workbook

Open the Window, 1re. Workbook

Open the Window, 1re. Workbook
Authors: Vesque, Brusson, Habert
Catalog: Book
Media: Broché
Release Date: 01 August, 1999
Publisher: Hachette
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Customer Review:
tres bon TD
Ce work book est tres bien realisé

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