Someone in real life mentioned an essay in Harpers about being on a cruise and how it‘s sort of revisiting this David Foster Wallace essay from thirty years ago. Having only ever reading half of Infinite Jest 12 years ago, I decided I should read his cruise essay before I read this new one because I mean that’s what you do when you spend your whole day falling in holes, but now I‘ve read about 300 pages of his nonfiction and I don’t especially know if I like it or if I find it maybe a bit too annoyingly clever or smug or even a bit sad but in a good way, though mostly I think it‘s clear is that Tim Rogers at some point probably read a whole lot of David Foster Wallace, which wouldn’t be surprising since he's the right age to be someone who was fully enamored with DFW when he was in college or high school.
I still have not read the new cruise essay in Harpers.
I was trying to read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld but kind of kept forgetting that I was reading it, which is an insult to me _and_ Patricia McKillip, whose books I've generally liked to far.
I've also been slowly waddling through The Once and Future King by TH White, which is utterly bizarre in both fascinating and tedious ways.
Mostly I'm reading Suttree now, which is very funny and very wordy and very apocalyptically gleeful about abject horror in east Tennessee.
@“wickedcestus”#p114065 this was really well said and i've been thinking about what you said about DFW not incorporating joy into his writing since i first read this
i wrote a story recently that definitely had murnane‘s fingerprints on it, but in light of all the DFW talk, there is also some of his DNA in there. similar to what @radicaledward hinted at, DFW defined a sort of “maximalism” for a lot of writers and readers in the general age range of most of us here. in other words, i think an appropriate lesson learned from DFW would be to keep writing until you get to the actual thing you’re trying to say, then write beyond it. you can replace “writing” with “thinking” in that sentence and the point still stands.
as myself and others have mentioned, this style can quickly becoming sanguine or annoying or precocious or whatever. but i think it's important to note that the only reason that style has those qualities is because it's an attempt at dissecting the anatomy of thought and feeling. whether or not the conclusion is agreeable, it's undeniable that there are infinite layers to all of us that require infinite words (or an infinite jest 😏😏😏).
idk what point i'm trying to make here. i remember DFW said in an interview that all the writers of his generation live in nabakov's shadow, and i think that, in some small way, writers like myself (overeducated american white male in his 30's) live in DFW's shadow. reading over what i spent the last month writing, this is a true statement, even if it's unfortunate. but maybe that's just for me--da sensitive white boy from the midwest.
@“wickedcestus”#185 after listening to your Fathers and Sons podcast episode, I have an unsolicited recommendation for you of a book I haven't read yet but have been wanting to for a long time: Family by Ba Jin.
Specifically what makes me think of it is your comment about 19th century Russian literature having all sorts of extreme characters in extreme situations due to the economic and political weirdness of Russia's late development. Early 20th century China could perhaps be likened to late 19th century Russia in that regard. Your comment could, for instance, very well describe some of the big names writing after the May 4th movement, like Lu Xun or Yu Dafu. The reason I'm interested in Ba Jin's Family (and also why I think you might be interested in it) is that he was an anarchist deeply influenced by Russian literature (his pen name is a reference to two Russian anarchists), writing a Dream of the Red Chamber-esque family drama during this time of extremes. So it seems like a convergence point of several of your interests. It also takes place in Chengdu, when a lot of the famous works from that period that are about cities all either take place in Beijing or Shanghai (or Japan in the case of Yu Dafu).
Though this is all with the caveat that I haven't read it! But I will someday! So maybe if you wait long enough I will be able to tell you whether or not it's actually good.
I‘m trying to piece together which Onetti short fiction belongs to the Santa María world. I’m finding some discrepancies like Los adioses is listed by some as belonging, but I just don‘t see it. And I think “Un sueño realizado” might fit but there’s nothing too concrete. Hell of a little story either way, here it is if anyone's interested
@“saddleblasters”#p115397 Interesting rec! I can definitely see the parallels there between the time periods, and all those details definitely point to quite a confluence of my interests! I will be sure to check it out.
I started Nuestra parte de noche and I‘m shocked to find that I don’t like it. To many rules and invented technical terms about black magic and witches. Like the opposite of “El chico sucio.” A matter of taste I guess but I have a low tolerance for rules-based books
Anyone read Olga Tokarczuk? Keep seeing The Books of Jacob on store shelves (surrounded by other stuff I don‘t care about, but) and it seems structurally interesting (long). It’s won a bunch of prizes but I know better, the only prize I recognize is discussion in the mortal enemy of video games thread. House of Day, House of Night seems cool
Read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and thought it was pretty okay. I liked it enough to try Flights and if I like that one I'll give The Books of Jacob a go.
I‘m about 60 pages into War and Peace. It’s good so far, although I‘m having an unexpected amount of trouble . . . remembering what I’ve just read. Don‘t know how else to describe it. If asked I could explain who each of the characters is and what they want, but if someone asked me what just happened in the most recent chapter or what the emerging narrative is I couldn’t tell you. Obviuosly it‘s a complicated book, but it’s not the politics or historical details which are tripping me up—I‘m almost certain it has to do with the translation. After reading (and enjoying) the most popular English Anna Karenina—Pevear and Volokhonsky, whose work I’ve seen criticized for “clunkiness”—I did some research and went with the Louise and Aylmer Maude version this time. Commonly hailed as one of the best versions of the book (the Maudes were contemporaries and friends of Tolstoy), I think this is the clunky one! I read sentences and feel like I have to pause for a second and do math to figure out what was even said, and to whom, and by whom. Switching translations won't change the fact that characters are often referred to ambiguously as “the prince,” “the countess,” (when there is more than one prince or countess in the room!), but I am hoping the slight differences in syntax will make things more clear. As it is, the French passages are more readily comprehensible than the English.
