copying these hasties over to stop them from clogging up my notes. may revise later

From "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" the argument goes as follows: TV is all-pervasive, escape having gone from "impossible" in the 70s to "unimaginable" 80s --> identification with tv characters who evade death --> death does not exist for the viewer --> loss of eschatology --> loss of Teleology --> "This is scary. because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live."


From "Back in New Fire" - provocative title! This is an embarrassing rumination on HIV as having restored "meaning" to sex, "This has been what's 'bad' about causal sex from the beginning: sex is never bad, but it's also never casual." Such analysis applies DFW's characteristic ahistorical perspective esp. when referring to sex prior to the 1960s, coincidentally the years of his birth: "sex never was casual". the fact that he preempts criticism of this lip-licking fascination with the "danger" of HIV with the worst kind of Neoplatonism is particularly vulgar, "Nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are" - not incorrect per se, but it serves other ends.



On "The Seminal Importance of Terminator 2": the kind of facile self-important critique you expect from a 14-year-old: "The big-budget popular movies usually aren't very good and I'm mad about it." Vacillation between effusive, unwarranted praise for the first film and prude moral condemnation of the "F/X porn" of the second. He somehow comes across like all franchise fanboys, except even a hardcore Starwars fan won't claim the first films are "Testamental" and therefore of 'fundamental, timeless importance to our lived experience as human beings' [my paraphrase]. Obnoxious critique of plot holes of the second film "time travel (apparently not all that limited)" and even casting decisions "John Connor (played by the extremely annoying Edward Furlong, whose voice keeps cracking pubescently and who's just clearly older than ten)." Bizarre, contemptuous moniker "Ahnod" for Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he literally views as "essentially bionic" and therefore "vain and stupid" when making demands typically afforded an actor in his position.



We are reminded of the wrong-mindedness of DFW eulogizers who praise him as a "thinking man's author", perhaps correct here, but who, not satisfied with this, go on to claim his philosophical endeavors would have been as auspicious as his accomplishments in prose. Certainly he is well-read in these subjects, and ought to be in a position to comment. However it remains the case that education and 'thinking for yourself' can only go so far. Plato's words have graced millions, yet, as a dramatist might put it, "the wholly enlightened earth is no less radiant with triumphant calamity". Maybe the words aren't the problem, but the hasty, reactionary interpretation. DFW is wrong about television. Sunday morning cartoons haven't melted the brains out the bottom of our children's foramina magna. We do not find them grasping at little strands of carpet for a hint of Telos - of course I am being facile. My point is that DFW is subject to tiresome "generational bias" with the same baseless and ahistorical myopia he criticizes in the work of mediocre MFA students: Old entertainment (before television) was capital-'A'-Art and had meaning - new entertainment is dangerous trash which risks our Telos. Old sex (before 1960) was a meaningful and irreplaceable intimate human connection - new sex is dangerously 'casual' and risks the essence of human connection. Old movies (before computer-generated special effects) were Good - new movies are a "Return On Investment". Further cultural critique technically-not-written-by-david-foster-wallace-but-very-well-could-have-been include late '00s media panic about 'Generation iPhone'. Already such condemnations have been remised: if anything, the 'internet generation' has proven smarter and more resilient than their overbearing parents who 'knew better'. Let me know the next time you find a qanon crazy who wasn't telling h/er child to 'stay safe online' a decade ago. I had always read DFW's fascination with mass media as a kind of Testamental (if I may borrow a word) awe at the possibility for worthless, profit-driven amusement to Transfigure the viewer (in a good way) as if something could be created out of nothing; a real-life blood-from-stone moment. His obsession with TV read therefore as a product of a mixed libidinal urge caught between rejection of 'overdetermined capital' and embrace of 'desiring production' which underlies it. I will continue to do so, despite what I know now to be dressed-up moral panic. The book reviews aren't bad though. ( )

Maybe it's just me, but the DFW of this book seems more bitter and tendentious than in other works. Maybe that's the price of prophecy. Maybe he was always condescending and I can see it only now. One reason for the bitterness is that many of the entries in the book are reviews, and you better believe that this guy hasn't chosen to review something unless he has a serious bone to pick, a problem that extends beyond the text in question to spar with. This tendency leads to the most surprising and insightful work, and the most unfair. Both of these qualities abound in the prose poem anthology review, and it's infuriating to read. He excoriates the writer of the forward of that anthology as amateurish, proclaims that over 70% of the poems were forgettable trash, while deconstructing both the word-limited review genre, and the prose-poem genre. The review is in bullet point form. It's brilliant, but with a nose turned up at an extreme angle.

Deciderization 2007 and Democracy and Commerce at the US open both deal with the overwhelming Total Noise of modern experienced reality. In "deciderization" he finds a metaphor for a contemporary person's reliance on information arbiters (else face circuit overload) in his own duties as editor of Best American Essays, which are to subjectively winnow down an already winnowed pile of essays. In D.A.C. he rummages through this information overload, shows the callous spirit it engenders.

I can't do much by way of explanation of what DFW is all about; you'll have to read him yourself. I'm mostly writing this review for myself. If you must start with this collection, do so, but be warned: be on guard as a reader. And try your best not to skip stuff where it looks like he's spinning his wheels. Being a maximalist has its dangers, and they come out here, but it also has his delights. Ok, you can skip the review of Wittgenstein's Mistress, an avant garde novel about living in a world of atomized logic (I didn't get 90% of it, but maybe you'll fare better)

All told, this isn't his best work (with a few exceptions, especially the federer piece and the "deciderization" essay-- those are required reading). It consists of those pieces that the writer did not get around to collecting in book form during his life. I defy you, however, to find a writer with as strong of a reject pile.

I honestly think that my brain is not presently limber enough to even begin to track with DFW's writing. ( )

Wallace loved tennis, and his essay here about Roger Federer is the finest piece of tennis-related prose I've ever read. It's also one of the best sport-related pieces ever, on a more general note, and even if you don't like sport you'll find this all rather enthralling. ( )

As ever with DFW's non-fiction, if you're not familiar with or fond of his subject material the essays can be a little overwhelming - but when interests overlap with your own, this is sparkling, ( )