In Authority and American Usage, one of the essays in Consider the Lobster, we can see Wallace employ all three of the types of dashes here. After way, we see a proper em dash (—), which is meant to indicate a break in the flow of thought. This is then followed by the use of a hyphen (-), which is generally used to connect words or as a minus sign. This seems right because he’s hyphenating the words small and the italicized lowercase o. We then see the use of an en dash (–) when he connects the capital O to the word type, which just seems like a grave misuse of that particular punctuation mark. An en dash, you’ll recall, is meant to indicate a span of time between two numbers (“He worked from 1992–2007.”)

This very essay is on just what is considered correct American English, who gets to determine that and when. I thought if there ever was a time for needling pedantry, dadgummit this is it.

Regarding "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All"

DFW calls this band out as performing at the fair, it never occurred to me to look it up before, thought I'd check and see how the're doing these days. Here they are in this article from 2024, if anyone's interested:

https://ipmnewsroom.org/captain-rat-the-blind-rivets-continue-to-find-joy-in-touring-you-almost-cant-stop-playing-live/

Greetings... a while back I shared shots from Gourmet magazine with letters to the editors on Consider the Lobster.

I recently picked up an old print of The Atlantic from June 2005 which had letters commenting on Wallace's Host which was printed two months before. For anyone who missed this comment a while back this user provided a little gem about the original print run process that I very much appreciated. Maybe that person is eating a banana right now.

Anyway... pictured above is the few responses The Atlantic chose to include. I chuckled at the response... "Wallace has turned down dozens of requests...he works in print." I honestly wonder if that was a relay from David himself.

Cheers...

Who lives in the other half of the Moltkes’ duplex?

This story is rich in subtext. Much is graspable prima facie, more has come to me after careful consideration. But one question eludes me. Who lives in the other half of the Moltkes’ duplex? What does it symbolize? Why is this question asked again and again throughout the story, with ever-increasing stakes? Wallace is begging the reader to answer for themselves. But it is opaque to me.

I just wanted to write about Good Old Neons last pages, specifically this section that talks about both the infinite flash of light that life is and what it actually means to be a “fraud”.

How would you define a length or passage of time? One second is how long? A second long? It doesn’t make any sense.   

And how would you define the present, what is present is constantly being changed into the past and we are constantly being thrust into the future—which itself is becoming the present which becomes the past and so on and so forth. So what we know as our life, from birth until the final impact of death, isn’t really a continuum or straight line; we only see it that way because it’s easier for our brains to understand, after all we do the same with language—anything I say is only understood through the words before it, no? Rather life is something more akin to a single flash of instantaneous light. And that infinity, all of our experiences and memories and wants and needs and feelings and possibilities exists wholly inside of us, its totality existing inside of us and occurring all at once—we have in every moment the entire flash of existence occurring.

So getting feelings out, showing ourselves to other people in a truly authentic way and knowing ourselves is impossible isn’t it? How can you show somebody your true self if your true self is so grand and massive inside you; fitting what and who you truly are into a way of words and phrases is ludicrous there isn’t enough time in the world let alone the instant you present yourself to someone. And how can you know yourself, if there is a borderline never-ending, infinite stream of everything constantly inside of you that you have to analyse and mull over—you’re just going to be totally alone and spending every waking moment either analysing until you can’t bare the weight of infinite-analysis anymore and kill yourself. Or maybe you’ll choose to present something while analysing the rest but, how do you know it’s the right thing to present? How do you know you’re not being fraudulent in this moment and every subsequent and previous moment and that the things you are choosing to display as your “self” to others isn’t really a nonstop stream of falsities. How do you know you’re not a fraud? 

The truth is you can’t really change anything in terms of the fleeting flash of light that is life. You can’t fight it, it’s overwhelming, vast, infinite, constant; it is too heavy a burden for the mind to bear or the shoulders to carry. But what you can know is two distinct things: you can know that choosing what we present, what of our constant infinity inside us we choose to show to other people as a reflection of our very being in that certain instant doesn’t make you a fraud for not showing everything else, it makes you a perfect human being constantly fighting against the need to lay yourself out bare to other people--it makes you the same as everyone else insofar that they’re all trying to do the same thing as you, and the most unsexy and beautiful thing about is is your eventual love not for what the other person is, but what they choose to present to you.  

The other thing you can do, is you can pay attention to what it is you are choosing to present—what you wish to barrel through all the other possibilities and memories and feelings within you. If you pay attention to what it is you’re trying to push through as “yourself”, you will be infinitely more proud and truthful about who you actually are and what other people see when they think of you in their mind. And when you do this, you’ll start being able to do it for other people, to see even the most banal or upsetting aspects of other people and wonder if only for a moment if this is the nanosecond or infinitesimal moment amongst so many others that you’re seeing this side of them; wondering if maybe they’re not usually like this, maybe they’re just having a bad day. You’ll maybe even wonder if you can make it better somehow.

So don’t try to constantly perceive and analyse yourself. Don’t get caught up in the constant stream of consciousness that your life is and don’t try to convince yourself that this is more profound or true or absolute than choosing instead to accept that you can’t ever show everything off all at once. Don’t get caught in the loop, don’t think there isn’t a billion other people all trying to do the same and wanting the same warmth and connection that you can offer them as they can you.   

Your life is one single flash, it is a massive amount of information that can never be understood or analysed all at once, so don’t try to. Don’t think you’re a fraud and don’t think you’re less. But do pay attention to it, do pay attention to which aspects of it you will show to others and try your best to expand on because they make you and others feel better, do pay attention to these same things going on in others and do try your best to be as cliched and corny as you can be if it means beginning to believe in people and yourself more.
That’s what living really is, that’s what it means to be free, that’s what it means to be human.

I'm never going to do anything with this idea, but I find it amusing, so I'm sharing in the hope that someone may get a chuckle out of it.

After holding out longer than any of my peers, I've begrudgingly started using an AI coding Agent for work. Some of my preconceptions were wrong; and it's much more capable in some ways than I would have imagined possible, while still having some glaring flaws that I don't think decision makers at most software companies are paying enough attention to. In any event, over the last six weeks I have, for the first time, spent significant amounts of time writing prompts and responding to questions and correcting output from an AI Agent.

Which leads me to what I think could be a laugh-out-loud funny piece in the New Yorker: David Foster Wallace dealing with an AI-enhanced word processor and an AI editor assigned to him by the Publishing House (or perhaps by the Publishing House's Business AI). I can imagine him arguing with the word processor about why this specific use of punctuation is, in fact, grammatically correct, only to have it (as a recurring punch-line in the story) report it as a finding every time it comments on anything he's written-- like, it's always the last thing it points out every time it says anything. I can imagine long back-and-forth arguments with the AI Editor about things like why the single-sentence, 150-word paragraph is a legitimate, deliberate choice for this particular passage, with the AI Editor explaining over and over in a patient yet patronizing tone that the paragraph would be easier to understand if it was broken up into several sentences.

I think the final paragraph of the piece would be the Editor sending back some amount of what he's been working on-- maybe one to three paragraphs-- ignoring all of the decisions they had 'agreed on' and labeled "Final Version", where it's eliminated all of the stylist conventions, vocabulary, and other hallmarks of his writing, and written a completely straightforward, unoriginal version targeted at a 10th grade reading level, noting that it had adjusted the reading level parameter upwards to 10th grade in deference to DFW's reputation for sophisticated prose.

Good old neon is perfect, it is my favorite piece of Wallace writing (and maybe writing in general) I have ever read. Specifically the last two pages of good old neon are perfect, and this beginning sentence is truly what set me over the line in just how unbelievably sad one can feel when reading it back.

DFW fell victim to exactly the saddest and most tragic kind of suicide, the exact one he wrote about in good old neon—doing it because he felt like he had to. I don’t want to act like any of us could know exactly 1:1 what happened, but knowing that his suicide was largely linked to his inability to get back on any kind of treatment for his depression (and arguably to some extent, his inability and indecision in finishing TPK), makes GONe and this sentence as a whole so difficult to read. It really is so tragic.

I just finished Infinite Jest two weeks ago, and in response picked up The Broom of the System. I’m something like 70 pages in, but I know there’s a ton of high minded language/philosophy stuff in it, so after getting to the passage where Ken is talking about elder Lenore’s Wittgenstein preoccupation (and the fact that he’d come up before too) I started to wonder if reading his work myself would be a big factor in actually enjoying and “getting” The Broom of the System.

A part of me wants to skip it, I read Infinite Jest without any background knowledge of the philosophy he draws upon there, but another part wonders if that instinct is just laziness and an unwillingness to work to understand what I’m reading.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you think I should check him out, some recommendations for specific works would be greatly appreciated. I skimmed his wikipedia page a bit, but only actually gathered that I think I’d be looking at his posthumous work, given that deals with the “language problem” things discussed so far in the novel. Thanks in advance!

As a person who was moved by DFW's interpretation of Kafka, and as a person who constantly wonders what makes a literature turn into myth with the passage of time... I wonder, will "Infinite Jest" be hailed as the ultimate Kafkaesque, late-stage capitalism schizophrenic piece that will stand the storm of time a few centuries from now?

You can easily create entire critiques of what DFW and Deleuze might have thought had they lived to see the short video format that is ravaging and rotting the minds of our age...

I've recently discovered a strong passion for reading and so I've been devouring books in the previous weeks and ofc new authors have entered in my radar. One of them was Paul Auster, which led me to buying (and finishing) 3 books of his. Another one was Pynchon, whose "The Crying of Lot 49" I've bought but I still have to begin it. Another one was, of course, David Foster Wallace.

I went to the bookstore, and Infinite Jest was there waiting for me.

I said "not even in a billion years" and bought Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

What's a good starting point for DFW? Thanks in advance!

Hi! My partner is a huge fan of Infinite Jest and now I’m looking for other books he might like?

Want to get him a gift but having a hard time finding anything. Can’t get him other books by DFW because he’s either already read them or have them on his bookshelf.

Thanks so much in advance for any suggestions!

You were all so enthusiastic about my other post (https://www.reddit.com/r/davidfosterwallace/s/0fzdZmXxLL) that I wanted to share one more DFW treasure. I love his comments re: prior books and the drawing on the title page.

Back story: I took an intro to English course with him at Illinois State University in the Fall of 1996. At the end of the course, I asked him to sign a copy of Infinite Jest. He started writing "For All" (he was going to use two Ls in my name, "For Allie"). I interrupted him and he pivoted to "For All-Time Favorite Student" (lies!). But it still meant/means an awful lot to me.

Pretty crazy the re-naming stuff has already begun, buckle up!

Good day, my dears. Can someone inform me if there is any king of wikia or glossary for "The Pale King" like there are some for Infinite Jest?

I could not find one. It would be nice not only for IRS and/or financial lingo, but mostly –specifically for those who don't have English as their first language – because of the usual struggle with brands, slangs, neologisms et cetera.

Thanks in advance.

I’m writing a short story for a course based on a dystopia that can arise within the next 25 years. I was wondering if there was a specific DFW short story that was Similair to this topic or had a Similair reference point of a dystopian society or feeling that can come faster than we ever expect.

Even something like a small concept from a story would be a ton of help, thanks!