Whoa, so this is the power of sincerity
Whoa, so this is the power of sincerity
>The Screwtape Letters
>“hey, maybe this list isn’t that ba-“
>the rest of that crap
>“Kick the chair, Dave”
>IJ was just a genre potboiler after all, there was no deeper meaning
It all makes sense now
This is the pop list. He made another list.
whoa, this guy knows nothing about DFW
Wasn't a lot of his library self-help books?
they have his partial home library posted online you know.
Hey stranger in a strangeland isn't crap, buddy
He loved Stephen King. Not surprising
>Christian Science Monitor
>Christian Science
Link it.
I feel sorry for him. He literally didn't know how to be sincere and just say, "I like Donald Barthelme and Manuel Puig and Don DeLillo and Cynthia Ozick." He was so afraid of seeming pretentious and tryhard that he overcorrected and deliberately chose the most commercial and least cool books he could imagine. But this overcorrection only made him look more pretentious and tryhard than if he had just been honest with himself and others
I call it DFW's disease "pseud paralysis." It's a side effect of irony poisoning and is likely incurable so long as one exists within modern society
It's just called a lack of social awareness, no need to pretentiously attempt to diagnose it.
>lack of social awareness
Have you ever actually read anything written by DFW? If anything he had an excess of social awareness.
>An adult child's guide to what is "normal"
David, I...
HE WAS TROUBLED
Guy liked his Hannibal books
He just liked to pretend he was an average joe.
good list
Yes, which he apparently annotated fully. As much as I hate to admit it, I picked up a few after reading this. See "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story" for detail (excellent bio).
I had a professor who worked at the university where his annotated library was (somewhere in Texas). He said that Wallace wrote "what the hell?" next to the ending of Blood Meridian.
>those used books you buy and get all pissed because some asshole scribbled notes in the margins could have belonged to DFW
That honestly seems like a great way to get insights into the human mind that are deep enough to create believable characters while being shallow enough to be instrumentalized in a novel. I might try that.
>Against interpretation and other essays by Susan Sontag
b a s e d .