I think it makes sense to read DWF in order. So I say Girl with Curious Hair.

I CANT REED

new 'the pale king' excerpt

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/featur ... on_wallace

I put The Broom of The System on my x-mas list. It would be my first DFW.

That was the first one I read; good choice.

I've downloaded and organized the uncollected DFW if anyone is interested.

:flicks beanie:

Awesome.

Awesome. I love marginalia. I once did a whole paper on Melville's annotations to "Paradise Lost."

I know where I'll be going next week.

fleshlight.com?

Good, good stuff: http://vimeo.com/19929771

I'm going to be presenting two papers on DFW this spring. They're called:

"The Substance of Profanation: Repositioning Giorgio Agamben and David Foster Wallace"

and

"The Work (And Play) of Profanation: Giorgio Agamben and David Foster Wallace"

Not surprisingly, they'll be very similar.

in the NYer.

Has anyone read The Pale King? If so, what did you think of it?

Jonathan Raban mentions that DFW's many doo-rags were probably keeping his skull from cracking apart under the pressure of an intellect that almost pulsates before one's eyes.

Also, I'm curious, has anyone tried reading his novels using a Kindle? For someone so able to connect with the reader, intellect to intellect, transcending the barrier of the printed word, I find that I can't handle him on Kindle.

Also, would you compare The Pale King to Nicholson Baker?

I'm about 315 pages into TPK, and I can only say that it fascinates me so far. Rafa has finished it. I will probably try to finish it tomorrow since I'm supposed to write a paper on it that's due Tuesday.

I've never read Baker so I can't comment on that.

I loved the Pale King. It's not the epic IJ is, but I didn't even mind the fact that it's an unfinished novel. It's shorter than it would've been had he finished it "properly", but it packs a punch. I think it's more dynamic than IJ, in that he uses different voices and different techniques, and the themes he tackles are as diverse, or even more so, than the ones he tackled on IJ. But one of the things I liked so much about it is that he manages to do all those stylistic acrobatics and still make it feel like a unified piece of work, it doesn't feel like a mismatched patchwork of a book at all.

I love him, his commencement speach to Kenyon College changed my life, but I found I just didn't have the attention span or comprehension skills to read his fiction...

http://dolphindentist.blogspot.com/2010 ... oster.html

I bought Pale King and then decided I wanted to revisit some of his other stuff before going there. So I've been re-reading IJ in eBook form and I find it works really well. Hyper-linking to footnotes is convenient (as, frankly, is the tap-for-dictionary feature). I don't feel any loss of intimacy (though I have never really thought of IJ as one of his more intimate works, fwiw).