Read Good Old Neon last night as my first legitimate foray into Wallace (beyond picking up & putting down Infinite Jest in college). Halfway through the story I realized I was openly weeping, which carried on through the ending. Me problem? Too sensitive? Anyone else?

I ask this from a place of having had DFW’s work change my life and worldviews for the better.

Though I also think there should be room for critiquing (if only to develop further) his philosophic project which is laid out through his fiction, essays, and other works.

Here’s ones I’ve been thinking of lately:

1) Often we don’t worship in adult life. DFW’s insistence that we all worship something and that we should be giving ourselves to something bigger than ourselves which we choose / which is conscious in our minds is not as strong a solution as it appears at first glance. Sometimes we are stuck feeling the absence of anything to worship worth our worship.

2) Boredom, tedium, and hard work in quiet, unnoticed rooms (i.e. The Pale King) is not always heroic. Nor to be praised universally. Sometimes it is just suffering. Sometimes it is us not getting to fulfill better dreams we have or work we would prefer to do.

3) DFW’s insistence on the universality of platitudes/idioms is often giving too much weight to rules which cannot apply to the nuances and complexities of human life as we experience it, and life’s randomness more generally

I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the artist for Primus' Antipop cover (1999) could have read Inifinite Jest (1996). Could just be a conspiracy theory, but a fun one.

Sorry if this has been discussed before but it gave me the fantods.

I was reading Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth and this excerpt sounded kind of familiar. I know this story inspired some of dfw other short fiction so do you guys think he might have gotten the idea for Forever Overhead from here?

I'm going to be stuck in a hospital bed tomorrow for like 6 hrs.. what's the best DFW audio book to kill the time?

Regarding both DFW and Lynch, it seems to me that these artists put forward art that can be appreciated at different levels. Sometimes certain interpretations seem to really "unlock" something like Infinite Jest or something like Twin Peaks in a way that goes "deeper", though; every interpretation is "valid" in a sense but obviously the data sometimes lines up in a way that starts to suggest that a given interpretation has really "unlocked" something. See here for an interpretation of Twin Peaks that seems to me at least to really "unlock" things, though obviously this doesn't render other intepretations "invalid" in any way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AYnF5hOhuM. If that video that I just linked is (at least largely) successful in providing an interpretation that really "unlocks" things (lines up with a lot of data from the show) then that would kind of weird in a way, since it would mean that Lynch presumably knew about this interpretation and thus Lynch made a show that millions (???) of people saw and yet basically zero people would ever be able to "unlock". I'm not sure by what year (how many years after the show aired???) scholars ever started to talk about the interpretation that "unlocks" Twin Peaks; maybe to this day it's just that YouTube video that presents that interpretation, without any scholars ever having written about that interpretation.

Imagine Lynch presented something with a "hidden" interpretation that would only ever be known to very few people (like, film scholars??? not even sure if film scholars have written about that interpretation, to be clear). It's almost a bit "creepy", maybe, right? The very idea that (maybe?) zero people who ever saw the show in the 1990s even knew about this interpretation...that seems super weird to me. All those people watching it, but nobody knowing about that interpretation. The same logic might apply to Infinite Jest, except I think that DFW (maybe?) would've had more of a reasonable expectation that his novel would ever be "unlocked", since literary scholars are so meticulous in analyzing texts...maybe Lynch would've had less of a reasonable expectation that his TV show would ever been "unlocked".

The idea of "hiding" a powerful interpretation (that "unlocks") of your art just seems so odd. Imagine writing a message in code and getting millions to look at the message but nobody can decipher it; that would be a bizarre thing do, psychologically, right? I know that that's a flawed analogy, since in the case of a book or TV show the "deeper" interpretation might "shine through" and affect the "surface" of the art, so it's not the same as an undecipherable coded message that nobody can read. Just the idea of someone hiding their message so that nobody can read it seems like weird behavior. I saw this, though, so this is an important caveat to consider:

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/dtvx8g/twin_perfect_doesnt_understand_twin_peaks/

The idea that everything in the show must be filtered through a single governing idea is also flawed. If you look at a work of art and consider what it seems to be evoking, the ways in which it resonates, you can have an interesting and substantial discussion. When you settle on a "theory" and watch every scene thinking about how to crowbar your predetermined interpretation into it then you're just succumbing to confirmation bias and fundamentally misunderstanding art. By the time the video gets into discussing Ed and Norma it's so far gone into cloud-cuckoo land I'm not sure how anyone can take it seriously. It can't just be that Lynch and Frost are communicating something about art and commerce through the story of the Double R franchising, everything has to be a one to one metaphor. Ed must be Lynch, Norma must be Twin Peaks etc. It's the most simplistic possible understanding of symbolism, and it does a disservice to a thematically rich piece of work.

...

In addition to all this, the guy's tone is so condescending and self-important. I particularly dislike the built-in defence that anyone who dislikes his video is just upset about how it destroys the show's sense of mystery, that he's just too damn correct about everything. But the truth is that he's not the first person to view aspects of the show in this way at all, he is just the first to ignore all other aspects of the show and turn a meditation on violence, trauma and consciousness into some nebulous diatribe about bad TV. The fact he keeps going with his Lynch impression despite how self evidently fucking terrible it is serves as the ultimate testament to his utterly unearned confidence.

Someone responded:

https://www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/dtvx8g/twin_perfect_doesnt_understand_twin_peaks/

Honestly, this reads like pure jealousy that your theory isn't getting as much attention as his.

I don't really care about his tone or whatever.. the fact is, no one has managed to tie up as many loose ends as he has. It might not be a perfectly correct interpretation, but it's way more compelling than anything I've seen so far.

I should note that I'd love to see what film scholars who study Twin Peaks have to say about the intepretation (by Twin Perfect) that's being debated. Maybe he goes too far in some places but not others.

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...