Mmmhahahaha

I doubt most of you have even read Good Old Neon.

OR he might have been talking to those and about those who definitely are susceptible or prone to aimless bitterness and angst within their boring lives. You got it all wrong my man. You just don't know what he's talking about it seems.

the premise is of a retard that hasnt yet realized that you shop for groceries on the weekend. that right there is all the proof you need that dfw is totally disconnected from the real world. he thinks everyone is so retarded that they run out of food and then get angry at other people in the checkout lines even though the only reason they're there is because of their own retardedness.

the internet as a whole has this really embarrassing love affair with negativity

shut down your PC, you just don't get it.

>delete your account

you sound like a fag

>THEY HAVEN'T READ THE PALE KING
>THEY HAVEN'T READ THE PALE KING
>THEY HAVEN'T READ THE PALE KING
>THEY HAVEN'T READ THE PALE KING

wtf I am hurt!

The "This is Water" speech was by a liberal arts major and given to liberal arts majors. It doesn't apply to everyone but it does apply to many of the people he gave it to.

it is clearly a message urging for empathy and perspective, above all the details. Only idiots could find a bone to pick with that.

Jesus Christ
Chill out

Yes, it is a message urging for empathy and perspective. However, it is also a plea to not abandon those things in light of a sort of "liberal" bias and distaste for people who are differently minded.

To clarify my earlier post, a better wording would be, it is more applicable in the context of the time it was given and to the people he was presenting to than to other groups of individuals.

Ultimately, everyone should strive to understand the virtue in his sentiment.

I feel it, I feel you.

We do. You just want your god to be higher than the man in the robes with the beard.

I paid 10 dollars for it.

ONLY AN IDIOT I SAY!

welcum 2 da waddur

I'm glad this is becoming a copypasta

I don't have a webm so this will have to do.
youtube.com/watch?v=YgHNtzxO0y8

Welcome to the water is transcendent

I found this speech amazing

the OP or the actual speech?

why DFW fanboys devoid of any sense of humor? pull your head out of your ass.

your post is here forever

But what IS water?

THIS SUMMER 2017

DINGO FUCKBAT WALLABY IS

'IRON-KNEE'

actual speech

this
it's a masterpiece

Wow

> a retard that hasnt yet realized that you shop for groceries on the weekend
>everyone is so retarded
>their own retardedness

the speech is directed at you and you still don't get it

It's already, lurk more.

>shitty autobiographical memo masquerading as a short story
>masterpiece

its a common misconception that it's autobiographical.
its a mis-reading of the last page where he starts referring to himself but he's actually taking on the narration of his dead friend.
so yeah, youre retarded and not at all an authority on this but at the same time it is kind of an over-rated story. He has better ones in oblivion.

Is he the old fish?

Please stop. I think Good Old Neon is excellent. But to say it's not autobiographical is fucking disingenuous. It's not a misreading of anything. You can tell from the first page.

youre fucking retarded.
The POV he takes on is of his dead highschool friend, a real person, who killed himself.
Learn to read.

he didn't really have a sister named fern, that was his dead friend's sister.
He's trying to understand why his friend killed himself and projecting little bits of his own pov into it.
This is where the confusion lies for most people but no youre fucking dumb.
re-read it.

in fact, this probably has a lot to do with why he DID kill himself.
Everyone misread the story and assumed "wow dude, you should probably kill yourself to make this more poignant", when really the story was more life-affirming for himself than anything else (though not really until the last page which is part of it's weakness).
So yeah, combined with Infinite jest it's fools like you who kinda cornered him into thinking he had some sort of obligation to diie.
thanks dummy.

he actually stole the fish story from Mcluhan also btw.

>The audience pussy and drugs were the ghosts at that feast of hypocrisy

I love DFW and think he is a legitimate genius but this line always gets a big smile out of me

I haven't read his shit but boy I love the red hot scorn some people have for him

Like this guy
If anyone else has any columns or youtube videos that ridicule him I'd love to see them

look up brett easton ellis. he's the original dfw hater.

theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/06/bret-easton-ellis-david-foster-wallace
yep that was a good dose

always been annoyed by that speech

Can someone post the track suit pasta?

I took a creative nonfiction course with him at Ponoma back in '94. We weren't allowed to show anyone our essays outside of the class for some reason. He seemed naturally intelligent, didnt need to look at any notes or textbooks or prepare for any lectures, he just knew his stuff and was super casual.

I saw him talking to a girl on campus one day. He uncharacteristically wore a Fila sweatsuit, the kind that looks like it's made from the same material as parachutes, and trainer sneakers with a matching bandana. That was his pussy hunt outfit apparently. Several times a week, same outfit, I'd see him hitting on women in it. I once saw him wearing it while carrying an identical outfit from the dry cleaners, he had like 4 sets of same Fila sweatsuit.

I asked him about it in class and he said we aren't allowed to discuss anything unrelated to class while inside class, the same way we can't show anyone outside of class our essays. A student called out "but Dostoevsky isn't in this class and last week you talked about replicating his black tea obsession to test its affects on your own writing". Wallace stared blankly at the student with dead eyes for 30 seconds in dead silence then said "you just got knocked down a full letter grade. Any other smart asses? Didn't think so." and pushed up his glasses with his index finger.

I remember telling myself this guy will either be super successful or kill himself.

i actually did take his class and this whole story is completely false. this entire thread is a disgrace as far as i'm concerned

Tell me more

>welcome to the water

>the older i get the less i agree with his shitty speech
yea it's pure bullshit

I once met David Foster Wallace at a grocery store in Pomona back in '96, a little while after Infinite Jest had been released. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face.

I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

I think his essays are fun

i read the Pale King.
whats your point?
I dont think you understood it.
In a way, it's message kinda goes against the whole premise of "this is water".
Or at least, it conforms to the ideas proposed in the speech but has a bit of a sadistically sharp, sad, and stabbing twist to it too.

>author who kills himself writes a story about a guy committing suicide
>thinking it merits reading and that there's any more to know about either
dude overlong self aware tangential narratives lmao

Pretty sure he killed himself because of poorly managed transition between SSRIs but ok

nah he killed himself to be immortal.
He killed himself on the day after 9/11, in the year 2008, and his wife had the same name as the wife character in House of Leaves, his greatest competition in the popular post-modern lit department.
He knew what he was doing.

the year 2008 being the year most of Infinite Jest takes place. He was obligated to become "himself". 12 years after its publication paralleling Hal's nightmare at 12 years old seeing the face in the floor and "believing with all his might".
thats some gold for you guys cuz i love you.

The suicide in Good Old Neon happens about 3 pages before the story ends, and then there's a fun like zoom pan away from the narrator that makes it all worth it.

I'm not sure there was a message to The Pale King? It's a bunch of small biographical pieces about people he knew, and some prose poems. Any kind of theme I could grasp was about boredom and mindfulness, which is exactly what This is Water is about.

This is hilarious.

do you think he imagined the water being cold or warm?
salt or fresh?

who is that?

>tfw you are not the wise whiskery older fish
I pictured salt water fish in the big ocean but idk why

>welcome to the water

Ugh youre dumb. There's literally 1 prose poem.
The theme of the story is that while yes, people are bored and all that "this is water shit" implies, they are still fundamentally sick, damaged and disturbed. People will do awful things for no reason, and sadly even those that attempt to do noble, courageous actions are they themselves even sicker.
It's much more grim than just dealing with boredom and mindfulness.
That's just the shallow interpretation

and no, those aren't people he knew.
Those are essentialy aspects of himself.
It really is somewhat of a memoir, he wasn't joking about that.

and by no reason, I mean traumatic pasts that try as hard you might (to be aware and considerate of) would still be beyond repair.

and i forgot to mention there's a big push about people's inherent and blind narcissism (think the cardwell scene, Shinn-and-the-birds scene, the exorcism scene and David's death itself), but mostly in regard to their children. This is what the Alternative Minimum Tax is referring to. In a sense, the book itself was David's child, his master. He was "that tiny white frightening thing"'s to command.

The whole Chris Fogle sequence is the most obvious of the many veiled autobiographical stories, but much of the book is explaining how he became "the author"
and the toll it had on him.

It's all very complicated but the basic idea is that David wanted us to know what goes on inside of other people.

1 and 25 both definitely have to count as prose poems, right? And there's a bunch of other pieces that are way too short and nonnarrative to count as short stories or whatever.

I like what you are saying about knowing what goes on inside other people, and about the characters being personality aspects, but I think I remember the book as a lot kinder and less bleak than you are giving it credit for. I haven't read it in a while though, so I don't really think I know what I'm talking about.

this is water is like the worst self help pleb shit, like it could have been ghost written by jack canfield or tick nat han or some other new age fag, i love good self help books, but that shit fucking sucked

the page turning section (25) is not a prose poem. It's a meta-reference-thing. The book is like 50% meta-references, mostly to current events and pop culture.

And it might seem kind at a glance, but when you really take in the details of his death and how deliberate it was, you realize this wasn't an unfinished novel at all, it was more so that he gave up upon realizing he that in order to redeem the picture he was painting he would have to lie.

Ultimately he was on Merril-Errol-Lehrl's side, the whole automation of society being the death of the human spirit. Think about it, he killed himself. Merril was obedient to another man,"Mans-heart"'s child.

Theres so much to it really, the doberman puppet being the insult-comic-dog, Fat Marcus' shit story being another veiled version of the college incident that shaped his career, McCool/Fogle stories being a reference to his own pathetnics and funnilly enoug the film superbad, and he himself being the unrecognized pale king, a demented-loon or stand-in for Jesus ("let jesus fuck you" in the excorcist scene).

Toni Ware being a reference to Beloved as well as strangely enough the Sopranos.
Drinion the Levitator/Meredith Rand's relationship as almost a stand in for his existential struggle.

i could explain but trust me, its not a happy story really at all. He

weak b8 m8

that's no bait
i really have no idea who that is supposed to be

and you read the whole thread and googled and still have no clue who we're talking about?

what makes you think that i did that ?
i saw the thread on the front page and posted
then i forgot about it till someone replied to me

>on the front page
holy fuck. just go back m8

i would have never come here again if you hadn't replied to me
and i only keep coming back because you are replying to me
but instead of crying about this you could just tell me who that is

DFW never worked a full-time job in his life.

He worked as a security guard while at the drug rehabilitation place (Jamaica House)and quit after a few days because he couldn't stand the early mornings. Of course, being DFW he talked at length about how he walked around twirling his flashlight and guarding some building etc.

He worked at a country club and quit after a few days because some poet he recognized went there and he felt embarrassed.

He worked part-time teaching college and even then there's evidence he fucked a bunch of his students

Dude was a total narcissistic, spoiled, moralizing douchebag.

Camus has the gall to insist that we find some weird masochistic pleasure in pushing the boulder up the mountain of our worthless lives. DFW, a spoiled brat and relentless self-promoter, insists that we treat everyone around us as though they possess and value self-awareness to the same extent we do, that we permit the raging jock in the humvee to shit up our lives because he just might be driving his ill daughter to the hospital, etc. DFW admits that he didn't realize people were poor in America until he moved to Boston aged 28.

He's also a huge fraud, far moreso than most. He lifted some of the examples from This is Water from self-help books, including the mindfulness re: humvee drivers, which was lifted from Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (which I've read). I like his writing and I think he's a smart guy, but you're pretty fucking stupid if you can't see that DFW was also an elitist snob. He's Pynchon in a cassock. He portrayed himself in a specific way that would earn him the attention of traditionally non-highbrow but culturall relevant / hip demographics, namely dumb teens and college kids (most of Veeky Forums) who are to literature what Mac DeMarco fans are to music.

This whole fucking thread. No shit, DFW is not a god, but he writes well. John Lennon routinely beat women and Gandhi fucked a child on his wedding night.
Infinite Jest is far from perfect, but it's a groundbreaking book.

I have, it's my favorite DFW book.

I still think he's a manipulative and pretty not-nice guy.

The older I get the more I appreciate books that don't insist on overwhelming you with moral lessons you already know. Also the older I get the more I appreciate books by authors who actually reflect the moral lessons they try and teach you.

DFW never had a real job yet insisted that being a nameless, exhausted drone was the height of human life.

DFW preached at length that some men were super icky and that women had it bad when it came to navigating male culture, yet he mistreated a ton of women as a matter of routine.

DFW played up the genius image yet he was a mediocre high school student who later admitted that he only got into Amherst because his father went there.

Some people have suggested he only told Harvard psychologists he was close to an heroing because he knew that doing so would get him into the type of halfway house that would be useful for his research for a novel.

The Conservative radio host (John Ziegler) who DFW basically ridiculed in a lengthy Atlantic feature article after shadowing him for a few weeks turns out to be a pretty self-aware and generous guy, who wrote after DFW's death that he thought even then that the author played up his "weird genius" image and didn't bother trying to get to know the DJ because he already knew what he was going to write.

Useful links for those who want to see another side to the Saint Dave narrative:

1. johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=165

2. ir.library.louisville.edu/etd/979/

calm down. it's just fun to rip on dfw. everyone here obviously liked him enough to read him.

I prefer Bruce Lee's philosophy on water. now that's some top tier water waxing

welcome to the milky way

apparently everyone has a thing for shit-talking DFW

this is an imageboard that was made popular because of irony

of course we are going to be ironic in an non-ironic ironic way

The this is water speech was a commencenent speech given to some graduating class what
This said.

The speech is about coming to grips with normal adult lives, becuase uo until now students didnt have much responsibility, and their days were filled with different classes, workshops,homework and maybe weekend jobs.

He was trying to give them real adivce how to cope with real adult life which is eat,sleep,work,shop for neccesities etc. After school this will be most of your life.

A real issue with adults in this transition is coming to terms with joining an "automatic society".
He is saying that with awareness and imagination, the sonder you get turns every moment into an almost spiritual experience.

>>
Nah, I agree, sorry. I was just being a cunt.

>people ITT actually think Good Old Neon wasn't autobiographical
>"b-but he wrote at the end it was his f-friend and shiet"

these are probably the same people that think he killed himself because of a "chemical imbalance"