“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace (1998) [pdf]
harpers.org
harpers.org
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-didn...
There's probably a better source but that's the first one I found on google.
And to make it all a bit meta, I can't help but wonder how much good it does me to read too much of this type of hyper-aware stuff.
Any particular Dostoevski you liked?
> I don't think it's unhealthy as long as you don't believe it's going to provide you with a solution.
While I'm not sure if that's true, I think the main danger is that, at least based on experience and observation, there's something strangely addictive to rumination. It feels useful.
Plus, as you point out, doing non-thinking things is very important. Thinking too much, especially when alone, gets in the way of that non-thinking.
In the context of this here conversation I'd say 'Notes From Underground' is appropriate. It's basically a spot-light on one particular character that makes an appearance in his other books too. It was really confronting to read the thoughts of such a 'loathsome' and sad character, and to then realize that my thoughts (and to some degree behavior) often mirrors that of the 'underground man'.
> While I'm not sure if that's true, I think the main danger is that, at least based on experience and observation, there's something strangely addictive to rumination. It feels useful.
I think the main issue with reading these kinds of things with aims towards a solution is they support the idea that there's some problem with yourself that you need to solve in the first place, whereas—in many cases—the only problem is that one keeps trying to solve this 'problem,' and if they stopped for sufficiently long, things would eventually return to normal. Although another requirement may be that you have to consider it not a problem when negative mental states arise (otherwise you just keep trying to problem solve your mental state), and reading can definitely help to acquire that. But anyway that's just my thinking on this atm—can't say I put it into practice super well ;)
Send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss further (westoncb at google's email service).
This whole "my disorder is better than your disorder" doesn't impress me, neither does the universal adoration of DFW.
Wurtzel wrote Prozac Nation, which was nominally an account of her own depression and a broader reflection what personal struggles with depression look like in America. It was widely seen as revealing but unpleasantly self-indulgent and unreflective of common experiences with depression.
That might clarify why DFW, struggling with depression himself, was rather less than kind to Wurtzel and her book. Narcissism is something to sympathize with, certainly, but seeing a popular book portray narcissism and a rather entitled life as representative of depression put a lot of people's hackles up. The context, and the move from "disorder" to "book about having a different disorder", are vital.
None of which is a simple endorsement of DFW, but it's at least worthwhile context for the piece.
The recursive spiral of recursion is really hard to avoid with DFW to the point you think it is the point, which, of course, is itself recursive.
Infinite Jest was acclaimed academically because it was a fresh return to un-ironic content and narrative.
I think IJ is more layers than recursive loops.
i.e./tl;dr, Infinite Jest is itself the infinite entertainment it describes.
Other kilo-page doorstop-sized single narratives that I've read and recommend include Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Wm. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. (The world is also full of good single narratives that span multiple thick volumes, of course.)
For example Douglas Adams likes punchlines. He'll give a long and detailed description of a kitchen, and oh by the way there's a dead body bleeding in the middle of the floor. You kind of learn detailed descriptions are garden paths, the details don't matter. If you're just kind of trying to get through the book you can skim to the punchline, smile, and move on.
Casual reading isn't like technical reading. Missing a detail won't cost you a week of effort. Song of Ice and Fire(game of thrones) is a better example. If you don't particularly care for a character, just skimming their part of the story isn't going to kill the book. You get that so and so is sad, and went for a long walk. Ok, whatever.
If you like reading for entertainment, there's nothing special about page count. It's just the fun of being on an adventure. I'm not exactly saying you just skip the boring parts, it's more that you internalize the author's style, and implicitly read the boring parts less closely.
I'd recommend "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," D.T. Max's biography of DFW. It gives a good outline of his life without straying too far into speculation/psychoanalysis. I usually try to approach books without any knowledge of the author but I feel like knowing DFW's history enhanced my enjoyment of his writing (especially non-fiction).
but beware! that's what happens when you're around a writer.
IJ is by far my all-time favorite book. just amazing.
(though the tech and math parts are cringe-worthy!)
i think stuff by e. g. william gibson from even earlier still holds up, so it's not just a "oh, time passed him by" thing.
apparently the book originally had much more of a cyber-punk bent, and his editor convinced him to trim most of that out, which has got to be one of the all-time great wins in editing.
i've been skeptical yet intrigued by everything & more since forever; will definitely have to pick it up at some point.
"And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in."
That was one sentence. There are many favorable adjectives one could reasonably apply to it, but IMHO "tight" is not one of them.
(BTW, that sentence is not an isolated example. Here's the very next sentence:
"The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives.")
This particular work seems to use complex sentence structure to embody the emotional distance the depressed person feels from others, the difficulty he raises in the first sentence of expressing one's pain to others making you more isolated.
Yes, I thought that was brilliant. His cruise ship review in Harpers was a lot of fun too (https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...). Maybe I'm just too aspie for his fiction.
I had to take a 3 month break in the middle of Infinite Jest (not recommended) and even then, finishing it was the most rewarding and somehow obscenely frustrating literary experiences I've ever had.
This accomplishment/frustration thing is also central to the book and is "the point" (really one of several). The fact that it still has that effect even when I know it was meant to is a testament to how well it worked.
And while you are reading you are constantly wondering if this book is better than the 10 other books you could finish in the same amount of time. At around page 200 I concluded that it was not. But I am certainly glad I read those 200 pages.
And, having said that: it's unfortunate but you probably need to get past the first third of the book to appreciate it. And that's a high-risk endeavor, because there are legit reasons why you might never appreciate it. True believers say you actually need to read the whole thing twice; I can't make myself do that.
And I imagine these kinds of references continue throughout the book. References whose significance I wouldn't have picked up on without having first read the book. But more generally, I don't think I've encountered a work before on which I've vacillated so much between considering it brilliant or insufferable. Maybe that's part of what I find intriguing about it.
When I want a book to make my head spin, I read the challenge one. When I want to end a long day of head-spinning at work, I read the easy one.
I find some of the writing tough (i.e. impossible to read at night in bed) but the audio book for Infinite Jest narrated by Sean Pratt [1] is really nice. The narrator's speech is somehow easier to follow despite the number of clauses and whatever else in the writing.
[1] http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Infinite-Jest-Audiobook/B0...
Infinite Jest is a look into the sick self-doubting mindset that has infected the US(and other parts of the world).
I read while I was severely over-weight and 'depressed' and it was extremely validating to see the mindset so accurately reflected. I've never had a book where I can't read it without stopping if desired before(unless it's purely technical).
I couldn't get through more than 50pages/sitting for Infinite Jest.
It was pretty good.
As the sentence drags on longer and longer, you feel the narrator trying to glean just a bit more of your focus and attention. Her unwillingness to end the sentence and give you a moment to retract and catch your breath shows how desperate she is for connection and makes you literally experience the same feelings of those around her.
All of the little qualifiers and clauses show how acutely self-conscious she is, always amending and curtailing her expression of herself. It also shows how self-aware of her own negativity she is. Many of the extra clauses go out of their way to show that she is aware of the positive aspects of things.
But that in turn just reinforces our perception of her as depressed because we see that while she is aware of all of these positive things—having a support system, the expertise of her therapist, etc.—we also know she is depressed and her depression must be profound to persist in spite of all those good things she laboriously lists.
Prose like this is exactly why writing in the first person can be so powerful. You get to read the story, and the way the narrator experiences the story, and the way the narrator chooses to tell you how they experienced the story, and the unintended (from the narrators' not author's perspective) things that sneak out around what the narrator is aware of choosing to say.
Indeed. And if the piece had been written in the first person I would agree with you, but it's not. It's written in the third-person.
(I'm kind of speaking in general about DFW's writing, not about this particular piece, which I am not a fan of.)
In this case, the viewpoint is an interesting omniscient third person where you kind of feel like you're in the head of the character, but not quite exactly. Are we reading a third-person narrative that is maintaining ironic distance from the character, or a first-person narrative where the character is referring to herself in the third person?
So maybe that's the angle?
DFW is extremely "tight" in that he uses his powerful (and precocious) intellect to think about everything way, way too much. This overthinking translates into his choice of words, grammar, punctuation, what the sentence conveys, how it adds to the overall tone, and even the topics he decides to write on. It's what makes him so fun (and, sometimes, painful) to read.
He's certainly not concise, but he's one of the tightest writers I've ever read.
Having not looked closely before now into Infinite Jest, I think I better understand why it serves as such a pons asinorum for literary fiction in general. It takes a more than ordinarily diligent and accommodating person to get through it at all without her eyes glazing over, much less to come out the other end with any sense of what actually happened between front cover and back.
(Oh, also: "ghastlily"? Really? Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but...)
I do wish to note that, when I wrote the comment to which you reply, I hadn't yet read far enough into the thread to encounter the many people saying "Oh, you just have to power through the first {100,300,...} pages, and then it gets amazing!" Such claims for Infinite Jest are new to me, and it's an argument to which I'm not without sympathy; I'm forced to consider the possibility that I've judged the book too harshly, and that this may be a case where I'd be well served to suspend the usual criteria by which I decide that an author is wasting my time.
(And I have to say, that cruise review piece you linked is doing a good job winning me over, too. Thanks for that!)
But so anyways, by all means write exactly as you feel like writing. I'm a huge fan of DFW, for example, precisely because he is all fancy and colloquial at the same time, which happens to tickle my fancy quite a bunch. I just wanted to point it out.
Either you don't give a shit about 'them' and write as pretentiously as you desire, or, like myself, you adjust your style to distance yourself from 'them' because you dislike the association.
As it is, it's rather confusing to me because I can't tell the difference between you and the 'Eng lit academia' you seem to wish to avoid.
All that said: I don't think you write like a pretentious ass and I feel anyone should communicate however they want as long as the message comes across. And personally I like your style. So rock on, I guess :). But it's essentially what DFW is doing too, I think.
But you have no idea what's going on in the book for the first 300 pages or so. It takes until around 500 pages in before you're immersed in the story, and then reading it becomes kind of an addiction. And once you're done, you feel an intense need to start it over again, knowing what you do now.
I only really got the theme of it on the second reading. I actually put it down for a few months the first time I tried to read it because I was confused. But it's worth it...oh man, is it worth it.
In any case, I've just bought a copy of Infinite Jest, so pretty soon I'll be finding out whether I've treated it too harshly or not harshly enough.
But I'll say it: his writing style is incredibly self-indulgent and dreadfully dull. I guess it's a matter of taste, but it takes a unique talent to attend a pornography award show and afterparty, and churn out something as soulless, humorless, and completely devoid of a point-of-view as "Big Red Son."
I'll probably delete this soon -- I feel like an awful person for writing it, although I'm not entirely sure why.
But, I disagree with the opinion of the work. It's hard to take Wallace's style and content without considering the 90s and its historical and social context. A lot of what you don't like about his writing is actually his point.
However, his commencement speech 'This is water' is amazing, and I highly recommend it.
mostly here to say: all of DFW's writing is basically a pain in the ass to read, and many folks (including myself) consider that to be very much on purpose - he wrote (posthumously so maybe wrote is the wrong thing to say..) a 550 page book (the Pale King) about the IRS, tax code and boredom (yes, that explicit ha) and honestly, it’s one of my favorite books of all time, though sometimes really boring ha (a choice quote, from an accounting professor to class: “To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”).
the fact that you were able to make it through Big Red Son at all (even though you didn’t specifically enjoy it) makes me want to recommend more DFW to you, because not everyone has the will/patience to get through a piece like that in the first place. To that end, I think for a HN audience there are definitely more interesting pieces like:
“Tense Present” http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0... (an exhaustive and IMO awesome essay on the “seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography” specifically with regard to the actual usage vs. institutional tradition in language)
“Television and US Fiction” https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf (interesting take on TV, advertising and its effect on society, consciousness and fiction - it was written pre social media and even pre ubiquitous internet, so can feel dated but towards the end feels prescient, esp. as it focuses a lot on one of DFW’s favorite themes: “what we pay attention to and why and how that affects our consciousness”, etc.)
plenty more, but i think those are both good places to start.
(PS: if you like David Lynch or Dostoevsky, DFW has AMAZING essays on each of them too, highly recommend)
It was problematic. During that period were the only times I ever missed my stops, both going to work and home. And that's with 2 voice announcements per stop over the train PA. Far too engrossed.
Also the closest I've come to getting seriously injured in the station because I refused to stop reading on arrival.
I honestly have no idea how people read that book in public. I read it during the winter in my bedroom, which was perfect because there was nothing to pull my attention away and interrupt the experience.
Also there are multiple endnotes that you read more than once, so I'm not sure putting it in text would work.
Some footnotes are chapters in themselves (or have their own footnotes), and I couldn't shake the feeling that the confusion I felt upon realizing that I had still been in 'footnote territory' was entirely intentional, similar to his run-on sentences that have a very specific effect. I rather liked how reading an ebook version made it even easier to forget I was reading footnotes.
Also, one of my favorite jokes wouldn't work if he'd put the footnotes at the bottom of the pages.
A much friendlier/more accessible place to start is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0...), a collection of his essays. They're shorter, tighter and generally much better commute reading.
After the first ~300 pages, I began to understand how all the stories fit together and the book went from feeling like work to being a page turner I just had to devour.
I independently highly recommend both.
Speaking of Marvin, it's by far my favorite ebook reader. One thing I rather like, specifically in relation to IJ, is that Marvin has a journal function that automatically tracks all the words you've looked up and the stuff you've highlighted or commented on.
It takes a while to sink its teeth into you. But once it does, you won't want to leave the world he's built. As horrifying as it may sometimes be.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/20/cat-bites-depression...
pdftotext depressedwallace.pdf > depressedwallace.txt
I feel the way you do about Eraserhead, to some extent. It's an amazing work of genius that I'll never watch again, because it made me feel physically il. I'm still glad I watched it once.