If you know me well, you may know that I am a huge (OK obsessive) fan of David Foster Wallace. If you've read Infinite Jest, I suggest checking out this video by the Decemberists. If you haven't read Infinite Jest, you're not alone; Halloween 2013 I dressed up as Michael Pemulis, including yachting cap and Allston High School Wolf Spiders T-shirt, and not surprising, no-one knew who I was supposed to be. Infinite Jest is an intimidating 981 pages, with another 97 pages of footnotes, so if you're new to his writing I'd recommend starting with his short stories (see list below).
I'm actually rereading Infinite Jest now (as I write this update in October of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, ahem, I mean 2016). Part of what I've noticed this time is how different phrases, images, ideas, and themes are echoed by different characters in different scenes throughout the book, in ways that are both subtle and unsubtle: the way a woman crooks her arm when lighting a cigarette, the metaphor of the pull-down weight, insects, malapropisms, deformity, pet names/nicknames, suicide, squeaking.
And then there's this:
Geoffrey Day: “As the two vibrations [exhaust fan and violin] combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.” (649) and “From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not…I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves.” (651)
Kate Gompert: “Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.” (651)
And this:
The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately’s outsized crib had been in the beach house’s little living room, right under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting across the room’s ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it.(809)
and this footnote:
119. … also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise. (1022)
and ghost words.
Here's a list (not guaranteed to be comprehensive) of Wallace' s published writing.
Novels
The Broom of the System (1987)
Short story collections
Non-fiction
I'm actually rereading Infinite Jest now (as I write this update in October of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, ahem, I mean 2016). Part of what I've noticed this time is how different phrases, images, ideas, and themes are echoed by different characters in different scenes throughout the book, in ways that are both subtle and unsubtle: the way a woman crooks her arm when lighting a cigarette, the metaphor of the pull-down weight, insects, malapropisms, deformity, pet names/nicknames, suicide, squeaking.
And then there's this:
Geoffrey Day: “As the two vibrations [exhaust fan and violin] combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.” (649) and “From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not…I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves.” (651)
Kate Gompert: “Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.” (651)
And this:
The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. When Don was a massive toddler his mother had put them in a little beach house just back of the dunes off a public beach in Beverly. The place was affordable because it had a big ragged hole in the roof. Origin of hole unknown. Gately’s outsized crib had been in the beach house’s little living room, right under the hole. The guy that owned the little cottages off the dunes had stapled thick clear polyurethane sheeting across the room’s ceiling. It was an attempt to deal with the hole. The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it.(809)
and this footnote:
119. … also overshot the spot to include that Mario’s a homodont: all his teeth are bicuspids and identical, front and back, not unlike a porpoise. (1022)
and ghost words.
Here's a list (not guaranteed to be comprehensive) of Wallace' s published writing.
Novels
The Broom of the System (1987)
- Infinite Jest (1996)
- The Pale King (2011) (published posthumously in unfinished form)
Short story collections
- Girl with Curious Hair (1989) (published in Europe as Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way)
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
- Oblivion: Stories (2004)
Non-fiction
- Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), coauthored with Mark Costello
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (essays) (1997)
- Up, Simba! (2000)
- Everything and More (2003)
- Consider the Lobster (essays) (2005)
- McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback reprint of Up, Simba!) (2008)
- This Is Water (2009)
- Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, Eds. S. Cahn and M. Eckert, Columbia University Press (2011)
- Both Flesh and Not (essays) (2012)