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 Post subject: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:19 am 
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While I think his fiction is overrated, DFW is an incredible essayist.

I just picked up his newest book of essays called Consider the Lobster and I am enjoying it quite a bit. His other collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing that I'll Never Do Again, is brilliant (his essay about being on-set during the filming of David Lynch's Lost Highway is hilarious).

Let me know what you've read or heard about him.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 1:25 pm 
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I was sad to hear about his death. And the circumstances surrounding it.

He was an intense intellectual, but so personally accessible in discussing even the most esoteric topics.

For anyone interested, here's an interview that he did with Charlie Rose.

http://www.charlierose.com/guests/david-wallace


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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 6:21 pm 
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There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...

If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

· Adapted from the commencement speech the author gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 6:28 pm 
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i've read most of his essays in "A Supposedly Funny Thing" and "Consider the," parts of "Girl with Curious Hair" and about one hundred and fifty pages of "Infinite Jest." By far one of the best recent literary figures I've come across. He can write anything but make it decisively his own. The essay considering the cruise vacation is hysterical.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:23 pm 
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I recently read "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and I thought it was phenomenal. I ordered 'Infinite Jest" about a week and a half ago, I'm waiting for it to arrive. It's going to be part of my absolutely insane winter break reading list.

I've gone through a couple of chapters in a book from my school's library called "Understanding David Foster Wallace." It's got some interesting stuff, including some sections on Wittgenstein that really helped me get a better grip on his philosophy. I won't say I completely understand The Big W, I doubt I ever will fully; but he's always been hard for me to wrap my head around and now I think I have a better basis for starting to understand him.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:39 pm 
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invention, that is genius. where can i read more of his stuff like that?

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:40 pm 
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Simple Torture wrote:
I recently read "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and I thought it was phenomenal. I ordered 'Infinite Jest" about a week and a half ago, I'm waiting for it to arrive. It's going to be part of my absolutely insane winter break reading list.

I've gone through a couple of chapters in a book from my school's library called "Understanding David Foster Wallace." It's got some interesting stuff, including some sections on Wittgenstein that really helped me get a better grip on his philosophy. I won't say I completely understand The Big W, I doubt I ever will fully; but he's always been hard for me to wrap my head around and now I think I have a better basis for starting to understand him.


i need to find that book!

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:45 pm 
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jcurley wrote:
Simple Torture wrote:
I recently read "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and I thought it was phenomenal. I ordered 'Infinite Jest" about a week and a half ago, I'm waiting for it to arrive. It's going to be part of my absolutely insane winter break reading list.

I've gone through a couple of chapters in a book from my school's library called "Understanding David Foster Wallace." It's got some interesting stuff, including some sections on Wittgenstein that really helped me get a better grip on his philosophy. I won't say I completely understand The Big W, I doubt I ever will fully; but he's always been hard for me to wrap my head around and now I think I have a better basis for starting to understand him.


i need to find that book!


The author's name is Marshall Boswell. Here's the Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wal ... 453&sr=8-1

As cool as it has been to read through it, I don't think it's worth 25+ dollars. Try to find a university lib that has it, see if a friend can check it out for you, etc.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 12:30 am 
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corduroy_blazer wrote:
invention, that is genius. where can i read more of his stuff like that?


i haven't read that much of him yet but he has a few collections of nonfiction.

as a vegetarian, you might appreciate this essay.
http://www.lobsterlib.com/feat/davidwal ... rticle.pdf

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 12:51 am 
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jcurley wrote:
Simple Torture wrote:
I recently read "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and I thought it was phenomenal. I ordered 'Infinite Jest" about a week and a half ago, I'm waiting for it to arrive. It's going to be part of my absolutely insane winter break reading list.

I've gone through a couple of chapters in a book from my school's library called "Understanding David Foster Wallace." It's got some interesting stuff, including some sections on Wittgenstein that really helped me get a better grip on his philosophy. I won't say I completely understand The Big W, I doubt I ever will fully; but he's always been hard for me to wrap my head around and now I think I have a better basis for starting to understand him.


i need to find that book!

google books has about 200 pages of it.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3N4irb ... #PPA217,M1

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:12 am 
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thanks fellas. i'll be looking for it at my university's library tomorrow.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 3:21 am 
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The Future of the American Idea
November 2007
Atlantic Monthly
by David Foster Wallace

Just Asking

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

FOOTNOTES:
1. Given the strict Gramm-Rudmanewque space limit here, let’s just please all agree that we generally know what this term connotes—an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, Federalist 10, pluralism, due process, transparency … the whole democratic roil.

2. (This phrase is Lincoln’s, more or less)

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 5:18 pm 
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I'm about 2/3 of the way through "The Broom of the System" and so far it is :nice:

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 5:57 pm 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magaz ... ace-t.html

Consider the Philosopher

By JAMES RYERSON

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

But Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.

Given his considerable intellectual gifts and large cult following, it may come as a surprise to learn that Wallace’s one formal, systematic contribution to the world of ideas was never published and remains almost completely unknown. This is his undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy — “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality” — which he submitted for a degree at Amherst College in 1985. Its obscurity is easy enough to understand. A highly specialized, 76-page work of semantics and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart. Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs <t, w> (<time, world situation>), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a boat.

For all its inscrutability, though, the thesis represents an important phase in Wallace’s development. Once its goals and ambitions are understood, the paper casts a revealing light on the early stages of his struggle to use the powers of his formidable mind for the higher good: to protect against the seductions of the intellect, and to find solid ground for his most urgent and heartfelt convictions.

At Amherst in the early ’80s,Wallace, himself the son of a distinguished philosopher, was considered by his professors to be a rare philosophical talent, a genius in the making. (He later entered graduate school in philosophy at Harvard, though he didn’t stay long.) Even after he began writing fiction in college — he simultaneously completed a second undergraduate thesis, in English, that ultimately became his 1987 novel, “The Broom of the System” — it was still philosophy that defined him academically. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, an adviser on Wallace’s thesis and now a professor at Smith College, told me recently. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

Sometime in his later college years, Wallace became troubled by a paper called “Fatalism,” first published in 1962 by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. Your behavior today no more shapes events tomorrow than it shapes events yesterday. Instead, in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that uniquely constrains what happens right now. What might seem like an open possibility subject to human choice — say, whether you fire your handgun — is already either impossible or absolutely necessary. You are merely going with some cosmic flow.

Perhaps most counterintuitively, the fatalist argues that this topsy-turvy doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the simple logic of propositions about the future. If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it’s false, then it is the case that I won’t. Either way, it’s the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won’t do now.

Obviously, there is something fishy going on here. But Taylor’s highly sophisticated version of this argument makes it extremely hard to pinpoint what exactly is amiss, not least because he makes his case for this controversial doctrine using only a handful of uncontroversial assumptions about logic and language (for instance, that any statement is either true or false). What most bothered Wallace about Taylor’s paper was not the despair-inducing worldview of fatalism itself (though that was indeed worrisome); it was, as Jay Garfield recalled, that “this metaphysically troubling conclusion followed from these ordinary-seeming premises.” Taylor seemed to have scrambled the normal relations among logic, language and the physical world, detaching them from their proper spheres. There was a kind of anguish for Wallace in the prospect of a world so out of whack. “He was very level-headed in so many ways,” Willem deVries, a philosopher now at the University of New Hampshire and the principal adviser on Wallace’s thesis, told me. “He wasn’t attracted to philosophy because you could construct these weird, mind-bending arguments. He was quite wary of the mind-bending. Maybe because his own mind could bend so easily.”

But how to straighten out Taylor’s fatalism? Wallace proposed that there was a flaw in Taylor’s argument, a hidden defect. In essence, Taylor was treating two types of propositions as if they were the same, when in fact they needed to be distinguished and treated differently. Consider the sentences “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” and “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun.” At first they may sound similar, but Wallace argued that they involve quite different notions of impossibility. “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” refers to a past situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun was broken. “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun” refers to a present situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun is still cool to the touch. The first notion involves an earlier, physical constraint on firing (namely, the broken gun); the other involves the current absence of a necessary consequence of firing (namely, a hot barrel). An extremely sensitive observer of language, Wallace noted that there is a subtle indicator of this important distinction already at work in our language: the fine differentiation in meaning between “I couldn’t have done such and so” and “I can’t have done such and so.”

Armed with this small but powerful insight, Wallace was able to pick apart the machinery of Taylor’s argument. All the things about the “Fatalism” paper that appeared maddeningly simple started to look complex and thorny. By the time Wallace worked out all the details — the precise interactions among elements of meaning, time and possibility — it was clear that he had defused Taylor’s argument. (The formal apparatus that Wallace developed in the thesis, a so-called intensional-physical-modality system, would have been a novel contribution to the philosophical literature; deVries and Garfield each expressed to me their regret that Wallace never published the paper.) Perhaps our actions are indeed fated, Wallace acknowledged — he had nothing to say either way about the metaphysical substance of the doctrine. But if fatalism is true, he demonstrated, we are going to learn that fact only through an argument that draws on something richer and more substantive than the arid, purely logical moves Taylor made. If Taylor were to overthrow our worldview, he would have to roll up his intellectual sleeves and delve into reflection on meatier issues like cosmology or entropy or the like.

The real accomplishment of Wallace’s thesis, however, was not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory. His demonic attention to detail in language and logic, and his seemingly limitless cognitive abilities, had set aright a world momentarily upended by a conceptual sleight of hand. “In light of what we’ve seen about the semantics of physical modality,” Wallace wrote in the closing passage, “I hold that Taylor’s semantic argument does not in fact yield his metaphysical conclusion.” He then ventured modestly that his own analysis of the problem “seems to warrant the following conclusion of our own: if Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics. And this seems entirely appropriate.” Things, for the moment, were as they should be.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 6:26 pm 
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:thumbsup: on that essay c_b

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 2:26 pm 
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http://gawker.com/5162581/david-foster- ... -next-year

David Foster Wallace Novel, Unfinished, Coming Next Year

The New Yorker's lengthy profile of David Foster Wallace broke some news: Little, Brown will publish the late novelist's unpublished manuscript for "The Pale King" in 2010. Chunks have already appeared online.

The subject of the novel is boredom, as confronted by workers at an IRS center in Illinois. The blog Howling Fantods assembled a list of what turn out to have been "Pale King" excerpts going back to 2006, many of them online. The most recent excerpt is the one published by the New Yorker alongside this week's profile (partly typeset and party as a photographic reproduction.

Little, Brown released a statement that the novel runs "several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines and other material." Wallace left the manuscript in the garage, to be discovered by his wife. He apparently did not feel the material ready to publish. But the work, like the New Yorker's epic, "intimate" and ultimately difficult profile, would seem befitting the "maximalist" postmodern author at least in its (hopefully glorious) sprawl.


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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:53 pm 
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:nice:

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 7:58 pm 
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Began reading him. Really like him.

I especially like him because he was labled a postmodernist writer when he denied it. From what I read he called for literture or philosphy (or whatever) to find meaning again out of meaninglessness. Deep down he was a romantic.


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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 10:18 pm 
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corduroy_blazer wrote:
invention, that is genius. where can i read more of his stuff like that?


One of my friends is pretty much suicidal right now and that piece is exactly what I was trying to explain to him. It's pretty much the essence of what I've gone through as I've tried to rebuild my life over the last two years. Just e-mailed it to him. Thanks a lot, invention.

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 Post subject: Re: David Foster Wallace
PostPosted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 2:57 pm 
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pick up this weeks new yorker. a must for any dfw devotees.

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