WRITING IT ALL DOWN UNTIL THE LEVEE BREAKS
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Ted Burke |
David Foster Wallace is an interesting writer who is in dire
need of a vicious but fair editor. He notices everything that is odd and
potentially wonderful of ponder in his world, but he's able to organize his
perceptions; he lacks the ability to discriminate what's actually interesting
to a reader from that which is worth only a smirk and a snort for himself. A Supposedly Fun Thing works,
I suppose, because its nonfiction and the pieces are short, but even here he
doesn't take advantage of the compression. He goes rather long too often, and
what's wonderful about his writing and his intelligence is lost. It is really
too much work to sift through the giddy semiotics to unearth the verbal gems.
Barthes himself had the good sense too- be brief in the columns he wrote for
the French popular press.
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Ted Burke |
Infinite Jest is
perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most
chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel
is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line
as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis,
Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and
what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect
of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure
satire, but Wallace seems far too eager to surpass Gravity's Rainbow and The
Recognitions in his long, sentences, most of which in retrospect gave you the
sense of what Allen Ginsberg's referred to as the Box Car effect, the cars of a
train rushing by at great speed and, for
a period, seem to be without beginning or end There is so much contained
within, so many things mentioned, so many things half described and given half
contexts for qualities that resonate only a little, it becomes intoxicating for
a bit, dizzying for many, impressive in the author’s ability to fit so much
detail of tangible things into so many long, sequential sentences and still,
stay within the ever-expanding idea of what good grammar and construction happens
to be.
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Ted Burke |
There are those this
shows genius and perhaps it does, but it is the sort of genius I respect and
admiring for the sheer will to took to connect everything inside one’s complete
set of pockets with everything fleeting thought and arcane that makes an appearance
in casual chatter or the slight movement of a body part, the turn of the head,
for example, or the flick of a cigarette ash from a nearly dead smoke. The
closest I could go is that it resembles Henry James at best, with heavy
seasoning provided by Thomas Pynchon and his own going themes of Systems of
Meaning and Organization and how that turns the study of history (or even
discussion of what one had for lunch) into a unfathomable inquiry that blurs
the subject just by asking the questions. The element of not being able to
decide the underlying meaning of a storyline on the molecular level , the level
of the sentence coming into being as the writer attempts to put the ideas, one
following the other , into an appreciable order is DFW’s biggest break through.
He links everything in grammatically readable sentences, but there is deluge
rather than word flow and, if you’re someone committed to finishing every book
you started to read as I used to be, you are eventually weighed upon too much
by information that turns out to be a distended set up for a joke and no longer
mistake the linking of things for coherence. The aforementioned editor I
proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this
set of multi-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned
authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise
that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that
developing one's own style is.
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