Opinion on DFW's essays?

Are they worthwhile?
Also general DFW/non-IJ thread.

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reductress.com/post/why-im-waiting-for-the-right-man-to-tell-me-to-read-infinite-jest/
thecut.com/2015/08/david-foster-wallace-beloved-author-of-bros.html
exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/
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Not bad, but better when he talks about things he knows, like Kafka or the Afro-american Vernacular English (sorry if that's not the correct term, I read the essay long ago.)

When he talks about general topics, he's just, meh.

They're fucking invertebrates. A lobster "brain" is just a nerve ganglia. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. They can't think, they can't learn. There is no discernible cognition.

Typical rich boy's problem uh I sad coz my tasty lobsters felt pain, I'm willing to pay twice the price if they didn't suffer though

Big Red Son, on the porn video awards, is a very fun read

Thanks. Have you or other anons read any of his fiction besides IJ?

They still display nociception and could feel pain you literally don't know faggot go be a p-zombie somewhere else.

Unrelated to the thread at hand really, but in my opinion, since invertebrates likely don't have emotions, they may feel something like what we call physical pain but without the emotional intensity and awfulness we ascribe to it -- the "This is terribly agonizing!". In my opinion, it'd be more like a warning signal and a mechanical reflex against things that could potentially kill them. Wallace considers this in his essay, I think comparing it to some reports of people on opiates/painkillers, or with certain neurological defects which cause them to feel pain differently, in which someone can still feel something in wherever the pain in their body is, but just doesn't really feel it as pleasant or unpleasant -- just neutral.

Sounds genuinely interesting (at least written from DFW's perspective). After skimming the wikipedia articles on his essays once, I realized there's even some Veeky Forums-meme related stuff. Might give it a shot.

>"Overlooked: five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960" appeared on Salon.com in 1999. Wallace mentions Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass (1966); Steps by Jerzy Kosiński (1968); Angels by Denis Johnson (1983); Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985); and Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (1988).

>"Authority and American Usage" A 62-page review of Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Wallace applies George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" to grammar and the conditions of class and power in millennial American communication. While discussing the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, Wallace digresses to discuss the legitimacy of Ebonics as opposed to "white male" standard English. Originally published as "Tense Present: Democracy, English and Wars over Usage" in the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine.[2] (as mentioned)

nociception is the term you're looking for