I’m continuing to live with David Foster Wallace quite a bit. Following his reflections on the tyranny of irony, consider what he says later in the same essay: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic…
While, in my last post, I was praising David Foster Wallace’s writing and voice–a “formal” praise–he is (was, sadly) also stunningly brilliant, even prescient. For example, consider just one of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, “E UNIBAS PLURAM: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which is something of a metacommentary on…
The book from my summer reading that probably most affected me was David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. While Lipsky’s voice is a bit irritating, and while the book feels like a sort of theft on Lipsky’s part, the transcript of a 5-day of…