Mentions (42)
"There is no book titled 'David Foster Wallace: Letters.' The Harry Ransom Center, which has an inventory of Wallace's papers, has only one fan letter from 1997. The letter from the post yesterday is dated March 9, 2004. If anyone has proof that the letter is real, I'd be grateful to see it."
"I've seen it countless times. DFW, DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, Franzen, etc., get blasted as just 'being a bunch of white males thinking they're great novelists.' Most of these guys' work isn't even controversial or about race."
"When I joined the sub I remember talking abt cool shit like Lou Reed and David Foster Wallace and now I'm supposed to care about guys who don't get pussy and laugh at virgin/short jokes."
"The internet privileges two modes of behavior: either extreme emotion or detached irony and self awareness. The first is reactive and cannot build anything wortwhile. DFW and media theorists have warned us about the influence of mass media regarding the second."
"Of course the LARP falls apart when users get weirdly defensive when you point out that most traditional people don't spend their free time reading David Foster Wallace novels, analyzing Lynch films, or leaving their kids with the nanny so they can meet their girlfriends at the upscale wine bar."
"But he's a literary giant and a very cool guy and I will not allow BPD "art hoes" to turn him into the new David Foster Wallace, red flag, bro lit author."
"The idea that somebody whose whole thing is being very upfront and candid and afraid and insecure about what they say is viewed as something that's a red flag, or cringe, or dangerous is so frustrating. Yes! Infinite Jest has the most bookmarks on my tablet! He wrote a lot of lines that I related wi"
"Bring back the DFW/Pynchon/Brett Easton Ellis/Jonathan Franzen/Chuck Palahnhiuk wannabes."
"Lately I've been getting older and so I found this quote poignant. If there's any advice I can give to younger people it's to not dwell in uncertainty. The worst thing you can do is to abdicate your responsibility to make choices and let life pass you by."
"They're always circling girls who talk about books online. Like, constantly. Parroting DFW quotes they don't understand, self deprecating just enough to seem safe, claiming they're emotionally literate because they cry when they're high."
"Mention: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, your mom, your exes, MMA, gross medical conditions (yours or others'), David Foster Wallace, video games"
"David Foster Wallace compared his own popularity to that of someone who does 'contemporary classical music' and that seems spot on. That's why I find the discourse around him specifically to be so bizarre. Anyone reading Infinite Jest is in the .0001% of people who seek out challenging literature."
"whenever i see 'david foster wallace' i immediately think of the ceo from the office instead of the writer"
"I start reading and believe me when I say it was some of the worst writing I have ever read. Imagine if David Foster Wallace failed the 8th grade and tried to write Finnegan's Wake from memory."
"All summer long, we are reading red flag books in public. I'm talking DFW at the coffee shop. I'm talking Tropic of Cancer in the park. I'm talking Pynchon at the bar with a $14 cocktail."
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day...How could he have been so right about so much, and yet seem to"
"Reading Infinite Jest for the first time so I tired to showoff by picking it off the shelf and explain it to her. She listened politely and then pulled DFW's "Brief interviews with hideous Men" and said this is what using Hinge is like."
"He is deemed either a hypocrite/fraud, or just deemed repulsive on his own terms. Think the stereotypical 'David Foster Wallace' fan as caricatured by this culture (Guy in your MFA etc)"
""Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That's what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates... Postmodern ir"
"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deat"
"i thought i was really new sincerity david foster wallace divine play over nihilism brained. but substack is too libbed out and earnest for me!!!"
"David Foster Wallace once wrote a piece about David Lynch. In the piece, he coined a new term: "Lynchian". Wallace described a Lynchian tone as "the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal.""
"I just finished Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and by God that man predicted 2020's internet culture and our cynical acceptance of everyday malevolence to a T."
"David Foster Wallace has a bit about how all the best life advice sounds hackneyed and cliche until you take it literally and try to live by it. I think our aversion to cliches is a natural consequence of the deluge of messaging trying to change our behavior: ads, influencer content, PSAs and so on."
"Johnny Gentle, the first US president to swing his microphone around by the chord during his Inauguration speech. Whose address heralded a tighter, tidier nation. Who promised to clean up government and trim fat and sweep out waste and hose down our streets... first US president to say shit publicly"
"I remember watching an interview with david foster wallace where he said that he didn't own a TV because he knew he'd get addicting to flipping through the channels and i'm beginning to feel like i might have to do the same with my computer and smartphone."
"someone linked this text in another thread and i read it for the first time. are you doomed if you recognize yourself in the narrator? i suppose that's the whole point of the story, to be relateable for depressed people, but how do you avoid becoming her at all costs because it's making me feel quit"
"I very much know this isn't even remotely a particularly new or revolutionary idea and already DFW, Baudrillard, Neil Postman, William S. Burroughs, Marshall McLuhan and probably twelve dozen other people have written about this in some form over the last 60 or so years"
"Some picks I come back to from time to time: David Foster Wallace (sorry)"
"No mention of his influence on Wallace could save me. No recommendation of Pnin could save me."
"I found it an actually interesting forum for Nick to try to work through some of his insane, recursive contrarianism and arrive at something close to DFW-style 'New Sincerity'."
"Every book is exactly the same but when somebody tells him his books are funny he says something like "I actually thought it was a very sad book""
"Should I wait till I'm 300 pages in to bust it out at the college coffee shop?"
"Mine is a youtube video of young men driving around at night, probably drunk, screaming at passing cars the name "David Foster Wallace" over and over again. Too bad it's gone, could've been used to prove the entire myth around obnoxious men liking infinite jest."
"I just finished Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and by God that man predicted 2020's internet culture and our cynical acceptance of everyday malevolence to a T."
"I remember watching an interview with david foster wallace where he said that he didn't own a TV because he knew he'd get addicting to flipping through the channels"
"someone linked this text in another thread and i read it for the first time. are you doomed if you recognize yourself in the narrator?"
"I very much know this isn't even remotely a particularly new or revolutionary idea and already DFW, Baudrillard, Neil Postman, William S. Burroughs, Marshall McLuhan and probably twelve dozen other people have written about this in some form over the last 60 or so years"
"There are also David Foster Wallace's essays, Louis Theroux's documentaries, and H.L. Mencken's writings"
"DFW on the trad response to oversaturation of irony"
"Listening to the audiobook for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace"
"David Foster Wallace said 'You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.'"