More DFW - Isn't That A Song By The Vaughan Brothers?

Just finished David Lipsky's book on DFW. 

Fun read. The moral of the story, for me, is how satisfied he was with Infinite Jest essentially (from the greek ontos - that without which a thing cannot exist) because he worked so hard on it. He is heavy handed in the conversations that the fluff is superfluous (insert Woody Allen line from Mighty Aphrodite: "I'm superfluous. What you don't feel good?" Oddly enough, DFW found Allen "schticky") and that the satisfaction is from the hard work he put in on the book. This is not debatable. Well maybe it is debatable but that would be superfluous ((insert Woody Allen line from Mighty Aphrodite: "I'm superfluous. What you don't feel good?" Oddly enough, DFW found Allen "schticky")

Seriously folks, I was class clown in 1988 for a reason and this class clown would have loved to have traded some "crackin'" with DFW. He and Lipsky riffed a few times and it made me want to jump in there and wordsmith right along. 

And of course the quote on the back, the bit about treating ourselves as precious. Somber. Bittersweet. 

Futile?

(The Vaughan Brothers' DFW )

More Thoughts on David Foster Wallace

More Thoughts on David Foster Wallace

While reading David Lipsky’s ‘Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself – A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace’ a few particular passages caught my attention, especially in relation to my earlier posts regarding D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story and my earlier posts on randomness:

(bottom of page 137)

So which rec chemicals have you tried?

I did some acid in high school. I did a lot of it for about six months and then--I never felt like I was the same again after that. It messed with me. I would encourage those of your readers not yet at puberty to stay away from stuff until at least …

Is it reasonable to believe that heavy use of heavy drugs before the brain is, as they say, “cooked” can alter the process? Is it reasonable to believe this impacted David’s, if we want to call it such, predisposition to depression?

(bottom of page 145)

But I don’t think I’m all that different. I’ll bet you’ve got three of four things (one might be addicted to), you know that you’re like that with. And one of the things I noticed in the halfway house is the difference between me and like a twenty-one-year-old prostitute who is dying of AIDS, who’d been doing heroin since she was eleven, is, is a matter of accidents.

As they say, it is a fine line.