The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace
longreads.com
longreads.com
Also, that cruise ship essay makes him look like a complete asshole.
It kind of reminds me of that book, The Lifespan of a Fact, about the protracted struggle between "literary journalist" John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal.
This kind of thing pisses me off, even if it's considered great writing. I've personally been interviewed by a rather well-known journalist (my only interview of my life, I am neither famous nor notable), and in the resulting piece there were questions I was never asked and answers I never gave. Thankfully the false words he put in my mouth were not so bad, but what if it had been something actually important? So this kind of stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Definitely recommend Infinite Jest like probably anyone else in this thread, but would recommend reading his non-fiction first. Jumping into Infinite Jest, I thought Wallace was some wierdo crank for a long time before I "got" his style and what he was going for. Even then, it took a long time before I enjoyed it and he very quickly became one of my favorite authors.
I think Infinite Jest and GEB are two of the only epic books that accomplishes so much, but in two entirely different contexts. They both build intense, well founded and well structured frameworks that lead up to epic resolutions, despite being respectively fiction and non-fiction.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fede...
The second one looks a lot like snarky "I'm the only cool person here" journalism, but IMO that sort of (typically bad) journalism exists in large part because Wallace could do it really well.
Oops, I misread your comment as "what", not whom. For whom, I dig George Saunders. Here's a piece he wrote about a visit to the mysterious "Buddha boy" a while back [3]. Saunders to me is pretty much Wallace's spiritual successor as far as style and tone goes.
[1] http://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david-...
[2] https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
I like Orwell and Twain, but I think everyone does. I'm a bigger fan of E.M. Forster's non-fic than he perhaps deserves, because his prose feels really familiar and comfortable to me—and maybe he's better than the credit I'm giving him, but I recognize him as a possible blind spot for me and so downplay my recommendation.
Asimov's short non-fic is of a very different sort (to put it mildly) from, say, Wallace, and isn't at all impressive by some measures, but I like it anyway. The pieces are well constructed and competently written, like his fiction, but neatly avoid requiring much in the way of characters or dialog, which is a very good thing for Asimov. They're mostly descriptive rather than "thinky" or philosophical. It's like reading really pleasantly-written and didactically-minded Wikipedia articles with short, silly, mostly-unrelated anecdotes prefacing each one.
I've attempted Huxley but didn't make much progress. Then again I've also twice failed to finish Brave New World so the problem may be mine, not his.
I liked "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold".
Non-fic that makes it into Lapham's Quarterly is usually great, with the exception of Lapham's own introductions to each volume, which I usually set out intending to read and ultimately don't.
Wallace is the only recent author whose short non-fic I've read in significant quantity. His writing is certainly engaging, which is why I made it through so much. The prose is top-notch, in that one's eyes pass effortlessly down the page, interrupted only by Wallace's footnote fetish. He's mostly really fun. However, some of his best pieces come off like drafts of sections of longer, better works, which is to say the thinking's a little rough and they seem incomplete. I'm far from an advocate of minimal, straight-to-the-point writing, but most of Wallace's short non-fic works are longer than any insight they contain justifies (notable exception: the piece on Kafka) while also managing to leave a bunch of dark corners one wishes Wallace had explored—they're good at making you want to read something better on the same topic. He's often kind of mean for little reason other than pandering to the reader, as best I can tell, which is both compelling and off-putting in a car wreck sort of way. To be fair, he's also sometimes mean for a good reason. Still, when my kids are old enough for this kind of stuff I'll recommend a few pieces to them, though some for only narrow purposes ("gee dad, what was being in the Midwest on 9/11 like?", "here, read DFW on the topic, it's a weak piece but captures some of the details of the experience really well") or only reluctantly ("Host"—the bizarre style rarely improves the article, which is otherwise one of his better ones).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/07/the-view-from-... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig
"Supposedly Fun" brought that moment back for me in a rush. Wallace could not feel at ease being "pampered" by workers themselves forced to maintain a facade of permanent delight. Such a feeling could only make alien to him most of his fellow passengers. Unlike them, he had to see the workers as complete human beings coequal with himself every way, except for what opportunity the world had denied them. With such empathy, he joins Dickens, Melville, Orwell -- and in other ways as well, Hunter S. Thompson.
So yes, DFW chooses sides, and his contempt for callous, oblivious passengers shows. But the real vitriol he reserves for interviewees in the management class, none of whom will give a straight answer to his plain questions about the crew's welfare. A certain whip-wielder in the officer's quarters -- "I wish him ill".
And best of all, the Press Liaison at corporate who tells him "The people on board -- the staff -- are really part of one big family..." To which DFW responds: "...the preterite staff lived in mortal terror..." (footnote 13)