There's a spate of new articles (okay, two that I've found) floating around the web about David Foster Wallace's unfinished manuscript, "The Pale King," supposedly to be published by Little, Brown, & Co. in spring 2010. I accidentally read The New Yorker article, which goes into depth about DFW's suicide, while listening to Margot and the Nuclear So & Sos's "Broadripple is Burning." I do not recommend this combination.
I still haven't finished Infinite Jest, though I've stuck with it over the course of three years. Every so often I come up against a section I just can't work through and set it down. When I finally slog through the passage some time later, muttering about footnotes and circuitous sentences, dragging my feet the whole time, he will surprise me with something simple and beautiful and clever and he wins me over again.
I've never worked so hard for a fiction writer before, and I can't think of any other writer--even amongst the Modernists I study, with all their deliberate obfuscations and esoteric obsessions--with whom I've had such a long-standing, grudging, awestruck relationship. DFW was a big thinker, taking wild leaps across subject matter and storylines, and his work evoked a certain charm and candor that convinced me to come along despite myself. Even now, I find this persistence impressive and annoying and wonderful, the fuel behind my reading experiment, what keeps me from closing the covers of Infinite Jest at page 737 with any sense of finality.
(links via Maud Newton and Bookninja, personal favorites)
cause i'll be hanging from a rope
ReplyDeleteand I will haunt you like a ghost