Is our guy the GOAT??
>The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home’s pool, a poet who was among the first ten Americans to receive a ‘Genius Grant’ from the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5'8'', 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems– brand transplants, he sat, or lay—or perhaps most accurately just ‘reclined’—in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home’s kidney-shaped pool, 1 on the pool’s tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35° w/r/t the deck’s mosaic tile, at 10:20 A.M. on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet in the history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade of the umbrella, reading Newsweek magazine, 2 using the modest swell of his abdomen as an angled support for the magazine, also wearing thongs, one hand behind his head, the other hand out to the side and trailing on the dun-and-ochre filigree of the deck’s expensive Spanish ceramic tile, occasionally wetting a finger to turn the page, wearing prescription sunglasses whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed, wearing on the trailing hand a wristwatch of middling quality and expense, simulated-rubber thongs on his feet, legs crossed at the ankle and knees slightly spread, the sky cloudless and brightening as the morning’s sun moved up and right, wetting a finger not with saliva or perspiration but with the condensation on the slender frosted glass of iced tea that rested now just on the border of his body’s shadow to the chair’s upper left and would have to be moved to remain in that cool shadow, tracing a finger idly down the glass’s side before bringing the moist finger idly up to the page,
Continued on next post. This sentence is too good for the chan.
Is our guy the GOAT??
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>occasionally turning the pages of the 19 September 1994 edition of Newsweek magazine, reading about American health-care reform and about USAir’s tragic Flight 427, reading a summary and favorable review of the popular nonfiction volumes Hot Zone and The Coming Plague, sometimes turning several pages in succession, skimming certain articles and summaries, an eminent American poet now four months short of his fifty-seventh birthday, a poet whom Newsweek magazine’s chief competitor, Time, had once rather absurdly called ‘the closest thing to a genuine literary immortal now living,’ his shins nearly hairless, the open umbrella’s elliptic shadow tightening slightly, the thongs’ simulated rubber pebbled on both sides of the sole, the poet’s forehead dotted with perspiration, his tan deep and rich, the insides of his upper legs nearly hairless, his penis curled tightly on itself inside the tight swimsuit, his Vandyke neatly trimmed, an ashtray on the iron table, not drinking his iced tea, occasionally clearing his throat, at intervals shifting slightly in the pastel deck chair to scratch idly at the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other foot without removing his thongs or looking at either foot, seemingly intent on the magazine, the blue pool to his right and the home’s thick glass sliding rear door to his oblique left, between himself and the pool a round table of white woven iron impaled at the center by a large beach umbrella whose shadow now no longer touches the pool, an indisputably accomplished poet, reading his magazine in his chair on his deck by his pool behind his home.
>This sentence is too good for the chan.
This is not a sentence, its just autism.
I mean, I like DFW, but jesus christ.
You know what was a really good little story? "Forever Overhead."
deep
Would it be fair to call this a "run-on sentence?"
>long maximalist sentence with unnecessary detail is automatically considered good
literature needs to be confined to the top 10% of IQs only
>tfw user is to intelligent too comprehend the genius of DFW
>tfw user is too stupid to realize that DFW is a mediocre tryhard who tried to compensate for his lack of talent with maximalism and has such a poor, unrefined understanding of literature that he thinks that the more detailed something is, the more impressive it is automatically
This doesn't feel like a story. This feels like experimental pop-art.
>tfw user doesn't realize that DFW's maximalism was a necessary historical counterpressure to the ubiquitous MFA-style minimalism-for-the-sake-of-minimalism that was strangulating poetic language and rich vocabulary
this was fucking brilliant haha. The comments on this thread implying it was anything except fantastic just show how idiotic the average poster on this board is.
Honestly kiddos, neck yourselves.
>you should kys if you don't find this long sentence from le depressed ex-tennis player interesting
consider suicide my dude
You can see he has succeeded in a way. People either love his thing or hate it. You cannot bring everybody to the same concensus, but you can create debate.
heh... but when you create a debate... you should also be able to... put it beyond question.. that you are right..
Please, more discussion on the topic of this guy who is our guy
it's not the complete story, just the first sentence.
Read 'The Soul is not a Smithy' from his short story book 'Oblivion' and tell me it's shit, fags.
Protip: It's not. He's good.
I never realized it was one sentence. He always said that you weren't supposed to notice. That's neat
We're a lonely bunch here, kid
how could you not notice, the passage is exhausting
Faulkner's page-long sentences snarl and crackle like lightning. What the OP posted is just a chore to get through. My God, Wallace is so overrated.
Sounds amazing read.
However the way he reads it and the way it's written seems different....
>Snarl and crackle like lightening
>crackle like lightening
>lightening
>Faulkner sentence
It's more complicated than to say that when Faulkner writes a good, long sentence, it's good because it's like something short. It isn't. That's not to say I was engaged the whole time I read OP's posts but I'm not convinced it's a bad sentence.
Faulkner's long sentences work because Faulkner understands how the English language works. He understands how sounds fit together, so he can make his long sentences legible despite their lack of punctuation or breakup. Wallace doesn't have Faulkner's poetic sense, so his prose is trash and hence this 'sentence' is unbearable.
You'd think he would have been able to fit some discernible talent into a sentence that long.
Kek
F
better 1
Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.F.R. leader can sense, perhaps that is why his sigh is sincere, his complaint sincere when he complains that what will follow will be inutile, Lucien's failure to assist will be inutile, there will be no point serviced, there are several dozen highly trained and motivated wheelchaired personnel here who will find whatever they seek and more, anyhow, perhaps it is sincere, the Gallic shrug and fatigue of the voice through the leader's mask-hole, as Lucien's leonine head is tilted back by a hand in his hair and his mouth opened wide by callused fingers that appear overhead and around the sides of his head from behind and jack his writhing mouth open so wide that the tendons in his jaws tear audibly and Lucien's first sounds are reduced from howls to a natal gargle as the pale wicked tip of the broom he loves is inserted, the wood piney-tasting then white tasteless pain as the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in rhythmically in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated 'In-U-Tile' of the technical interviewer, down into Lucien's wide throat and lower, small natal cries escaping around the brown-glazed shaft, the strangled impeded sounds of absolute aphonia, the landed-fish gasps that accompany speechlessness in a dream, the cleric-collared A.F.R. driving the broom home now to half its length, up on his stumps to get downward leverage as the fibers that protect the esophagal terminus resist and then give with a crunching pop and splat of red that bathes Lucien's teeth and tongue and makes of itself in the air a spout, and his gargled sounds now sound drowned; and behind fluttering lids the aphrasiac half-cellular insurgent who loves only to sweep and dance in a clean pane sees snow on the round hills of his native Gaspé, pretty curls of smoke from chimneys, his mother's linen apron, her kind red face above his crib, homemade skates and cider-steam, Chic-Choc lakes seen stretching away from the Cap-Chat hillside they skied down to Mass, the red face's noises he knows from the tone are tender, beyond crib and rimed window Gaspésie lake after lake after lake lit up by the near-Arctic sun and stretching out in the southeastern distance like chips of broken glass thrown to scatter across the white Chic-Choc country, gleaming, and the river Ste.-Anne a ribbon of light, unspeakably pure; and as the culcate handle navigates the inguinal canal and sigmoid with a queer deep full hot tickle and with a grunt and shove completes its passage and forms an obscene erectile bulge in the back of his red sopped Johns, bursting then through the wool and puncturing tile and floor at a police-lock's canted angle to hold him upright on his knees, completely skewered,
tfw to much talent in one sentence for you
>continued
and as the attentions of the A.F.R.s in the little room are turned from him to the shelves and trunks of the Antitois' sad insurgents' lives, and Lucien finally dies, rather a while after he's quit shuddering like a clubbed muskie and seemed to them to die, as he finally sheds his body's suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.
>wearing prescription sunglasses whose lenses were chemically treated to darken in fractional proportion to the luminous intensity of the light to which they were exposed,
This is rubbish, come on. Everyone can over-analyze and over-write like this but don't tell me this is good.
This is typical "If I describe more and more and write more and more it will be good". It won't. This is masturbation and writing for the simpleton's adulation, pure and simple. It looks clever but it's not.
It's satire
Try to imagine my expression.
Yes, surely its obvious he's taking the piss?
I tried. Now tell me if I'm right.
Amazing, thanks for posting
>"top 10%"
>I read DFW guys XD
>desperately use ad hominem to get reply