connor wrote:I read a lot of fiction manuscripts. The DFW devotees have the following in common:

-their stories are chock full of lush and serpentine prose: highly stylized, approaching virtuosic
-footnotes and semi-colons galore
-sporadic political rantings
-strictly interior conflicts (angsty juvenilia)
-snipes at other people in the workshop
-nu-metal lyrics
-NIN lyrics

Sob. Sorry to hear it. Please don't blame DFW.

Who loves Oblivion? I changed my opinion about it last fall. "Good Old Neon" is amazing. Great new story in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago too.

I wrote:he is not unattractive, for a wordy neurotic motherfucker

I retract this, faint praise though it was to begin with. Based on photos from some literary event in Italy last year he is neither especially attractive nor unattractive; my head would not turn; still he is the present-day NOT CRAP writer nonpareil, to me. Also he smokes.

ctrl-s wrote:he is the NOT CRAP writer nonpareil.

I understand that you're a fan, but this is a nutty statement. It's nutty.

Right. See my edit. I added "present-day" and "to me."

He's defintely not fugly. I like his look, personally...

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksda ... allace.jpg

Yeah, "Good Old Neon" is fantastic. Oblivion on a whole is great. I just picked up Consider The Lobster from the library the other day, I'm sure it'll satisfy.

I haven't finished Infinite Jest, which is a shame since I've had it for a few months and it seems to be worth the effort.

Paul Kemp wrote:He's defintely not fugly. I like his look, personally...

No, not fugly, but that's a flattering, eleven-year-old photo.

Dave Eggers' foreword to the new edition of Infinite Jest bugs the hell out of me:

Eggers wrote:If we are drawn to Infinite Jest, we're also drawn to the Magnetic Fields' 69 Songs, for which Stephin Merritt wrote that many songs [...] And we're drawn to the 10,000 paintings of folk artist Howard Finster. Or the work of Sufjan Stevens...

"We" are not drawn to those other things at all.

Eggers can eat a bag.

DFW is not crap

the Classical wrote:Eggers can eat a bag.

A large bag. Hee.

Angus Jung wrote:Back in the 80's there was a spoken word/art guy in Phoenix named Dr. Michael Pemulis. [...] I'm on to you, foot-notes guy.

Hmm. I believe Wallace got his MFA from the U of Arizona in the 80s; and I vaguely recall some minor flap about the name of a character in Infinite Jest, Kate Gompert, matching that of a real person, a tennis player. And Otis P. Lord, the Eschaton game-master who winds up with a Hitachi monitor on his head, was also the name of a correspondent of Emily Dickinson's. There are a few other little nomenclatural Easter eggs like that in IJ but that's all I remember right now. Anyway, we ARE onto you, footnotes guy.

ctrl-s wrote:

Paul Kemp wrote:He's defintely not fugly. I like his look, personally...

No, not fugly, but that's a flattering, eleven-year-old photo.

Where he looks scarily like Mark Linkous.

The Sparklehorse guy? Yeah, I see the resemblance in that one DFW photo, though I wouldn't quite say "scarily."