Movie based on the book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself", nonfiction account of a road trip between author David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace during the book tour of "Infinite Jest". Looks like it could be pretty good, and Jason Segel will probably get some awards for his portrayal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBk1Mrb4RyM

Looks interesting. I have never read any of this work. He left his teaching position at Illinois State right before I arrived. With my English
heavy course load I likely would have had a class of his or seen him around.

_________________
Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

I'm not interested.

_________________

Neither is Wallace's family.

The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, which is headed by his widow Karen Green, is unequivocally opposed to The End of the Tour. "This motion picture is loosely based on transcripts from an interview David consented to 18 years ago for a magazine article about the publication of his novel," said a statement jointly attributed to the trust, Wallace's publisher, and his family. "That article was never published and David would never have agreed that those saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis of a movie." If that's not enough, you can go back to Wallace's own words after a 1996 appearance on Charlie Rose, which he regretted: "I wanted to stay on my side of the screen."

http://theweek.com/articles/569021/when-does-tribute-become-betrayal-grappling-david-foster-wallace-movie-end-tour

Looks like hippie-type shit....screw that!

_________________
favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

"man from UNCLE" coming soon jimmy!

yeah,I will have my whole family there. This show (started in 1964) made a big impression on a 7 year old little pasta. It really was kind of cheesy but I loved that spy-fi stuff in the 60's.
The new movie looks pretty clever.

_________________
favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

An astoundingly stupid and ignorant opinion, even for you.

_________________

I hope your high horse breaks a leg....fuck you!

I just watched the clip,it looks like hippie-type shit,just like I said. I don't know who the subject is nor do I give a shit based on THAT trailer.

_________________
favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

The subject is one of the best and most important writers we've had in years. Enjoy the latest Ariana Grande news.

I refuse to watch the movie for a number of reasons, but your assessment of the situation wasn't a very good one.

_________________

Should be interesting. I understand that the Oscar buzz isn't limited to just Segel. Warwick Davis apparently gives a deeply complex, tour de force performance as a midwestern radio host who was a great influence on DFWs work.

_________________
Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

Ive considered reading all DFW's stuff based on much of what is said about him here.

But where to begin?

If this place is your inspiration, you can't go wrong with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

_________________
Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

Well, not JUST here but a lot of DFW love here.

Should I start there or go Chronologically and start with The Broom one?

Heavens no. Start with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which is seven of his essays: postmodernism in American literature and media, growing up playing tennis in downstate Illinois, the 1993 Illinois State Fair, the making of a David Lynch film, a profile of a tennis pro in Montreal, and his week on a Caribbean cruise (the title track, so to speak). There's also a short one on literary criticism, but it's kind of meandering and I haven't read it all that much. I've had this book for just over ten years and taken it with me just about everywhere I've gone and never gotten tired of reading it. It's falling apart but I haven't the heart to buy a replacement copy.

If you want more of those bite-sized (by DFW standards) chunks of cultural anthropology, proceed to Consider the Lobster, which is more of the same: DFW goes to the porn awards, DFW goes to his neighbor's house to watch TV on 9/11, DFW goes to a lobster festival, DFW goes to a Los Angeles AM talk radio station to profile a talk show host (who in later years would prove himself to be completely nanner-pants crazy). Then there's Both Flesh and Not, which was published posthumously and sometimes shows in the barrel-scraping essays that flesh (sorry) it out.

When you want to switch gears to his fiction, start with Oblivion, which is a collection of short stories, my favorites being the one about the ad agency in Chicago. I enjoy a lot of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men but sometimes it gets a little too pomo for its own good. If you like one or both of those, then and only then commit to Infinite Jest. The Infinite Summer group where you read 15 pages a day all summer was fun. I think that was 2009 that I did it. Aaron Swartz, internet martyr and all-too-brief classmate of mine, wrote what many fans feel is the definitive explanation of the book's ending.

Girl with Curious Hair, The Broom of the System, and The Pale King I would mark Completists Only. (Even with its filler, Both Flesh and Not avoids this designation because the essays on Roger Federer and Flushing Meadows are too good to pass up.) I was dismayed to find that "This Is Water" has been stretched out into a standalone book by putting one sentence on each page as if it's a See Spot Run book. This is a moneymaking gesture I find just as obscene as this stupid movie.

_________________

Great answer, thanks.

That State Fair piece still pisses me off. It's elitism pretending not to be elitism.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I don't think it pretends not to be elitist -- he's very much a snob throughout -- so much as it showcases the cracks in his elitism, kind of the nature-nurture battle of growing up the child of liberal arts professors in bumfuck downstate Illinois. Later on we'd learn that he just wanted to be plain old down-to-earth Dave Wallace, but I can totally buy that when he wrote that essay in '93, he was really trying to be a literary superstar and shed his past. Notice his fascination throughout the essay with the East Coast as this promised land of intellectual rigor and sophistication while we know it to have the same fat loud idiots as anywhere else.

_________________

Well, it's been awhile since I read it, but he came off as an insider-outsider. He did grow up in those towns, but he acted as if he was above the other locals by mere virtue of his parents' profession. Growing up in Evanston myself, I'm acutely aware of "town vs. gown" issues and the condescension of the transient students. (Now that such a large number are Asian it doesn't seem so bad. Or perhaps I just don't understand their condescension. ) Anyway, people that grow food aren't any more retarded than the average English professor.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I think DFW came to the same realization when he moved back to Illinois to teach at ISU. In the 9/11 essay, he makes the point that even as he's explaining Manhattan geography and taking inventory of various high-level ironies and oddities of the news coverage, the old ladies he's watching TV with are anything but stupid, and that it's his America people hate, not theirs.

_________________

I just started A supposedly fun.... and he mentions being sent to a "...plain old simple state fair"

Yeah, maybe so.

In a somewhat related vein, I really, really hate the concept of the "Ugly American". I mean, I'm pretty liberal, some might even say radical, but not in a pussyish, self-loathing, who-did-I-offend kind of way. Most liberal friends of mine seem embarrassed to be American. I've never been anything but proud of being American. Does our country fuck shit up? Oh yeah. Is slavery as an institution something that probably can't ever be rectified? Sure. But before you decide you don't want to be American, you better figure out what the fuck you want to be. And Canadian isn't really a good answer. "Ugly American"? How about you come to Lucky Magee's with me on a Saturday Night and I'll show you a bunch of ugly Russians, Serbians, Assyrians, and Greeks.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Here it is, from the original Harper's publication. It's only like 15 pages. Tell me you don't think of this place (among others). I think Neil LaBute based much of career on this one piece.

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/H ... 059714.pdf

_________________
Soccer 1,2,3
Spanish Honor Society 1,2,3,4
Forensics 1,2,3,4

"Smiles with Nostrils"

"...no Hmong, go find some blacks"

one of the reasons i hate labels in general is that it simplifies the definition of who you are...and the caricature of the liberal is just what you said. i don't hate being american either, i would probably be seen as a flag-waver in other countries when i look at their history and how they live compared to us. i like what we have. but, i'm also fine with being critical and pointing out the trail of tears and the japanese internment camps and the post-reconstruction era (nadir), which is one of the most loathsome periods in american history.

i go back and forth with how i feel about DFW. i loved the "this is water" speech. but whenever i think about reading "infinite jest", i can't help but recoil at the thought of how self indulgent he seemed to be with that novel. like he's tom wolfe.

You jumped ahead to the last one? I mean, I won't say you can't, and it's a terrific essay, but I think the first three really set the tone for what DFW is all about in terms of both his Midwesternness and his questioning and rejection of irony.

_________________

lol dude, i've noticed this thread up top on the active topics front all day long with LAST REPLY: CURIOUS HAIR all day now, and go figure that it's not only a thread about DFW, but also that you're not interested.

did they really do a character assassination of the guy? perhaps an unflattering portrait of a guy whose grip on life was evidently tenuous at best, but that grip also allowed him to see the world in such a way that he could go TLDR on it and it's worth reading? maybe i should read the thread? =D

but yeah generally when there's a film about a book like this i'd rather read the book. or well, i assume there IS a book about this roadtrip out there, right CH? thats what i gotta go hit up the library for methinks cuz i think i gotta get back into reading sometime cuz it will help me with the occasional heavensent desire to KILL TIME DEAD ON THE SPOT. lord knows i need that or i might start typing one day and never stop til i'm publishing that big blog in the sky.

_________________

ok CH, much like a newschool/ish simpsons episode i'll have my premise like "HEY THIS WEEK SINICALYPSE IS GONNA READ SOME BOOKS!" and i wanna go with (one of) your hero(es?) DFW... so where do i start with the guy? all i know about him is that you got your name from "the girl with the curious hair" and he has some book called "infinite jest" that was renown as some transcendentally awesome novel in the 90s, but i know absolutely nothing about the novel or even the writer beyond you liking him and he evidently committed suicide at some point in the last 5-15yrs.

where should i start? what do i go with? what order should i do them? yeah i know diving into the pool head first and finding out if there's water in it on the way down is the proper way of doing things in life, but if you're a connoisseur of the works of DFW in much the same way i am an afiocionado of all things aphex twin, well i can save myself some putzing around (and for a man belonging to genus name homoputzoafus i can always do with less putzery) and do that thing where i avoid the touristy stuff and get right to the meat-n-potatoes of the REAL city of DFW. yeah dallas/fort-worth and that joke/reference has thusly been made.

merci beaucoup and thanks for all of the fish!

_________________

My knowledge of the DFW canon is nowhere near yours, but I'll give a huge +1 to this. Wallace is most accessible in his nonfiction. Get through "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." (the full version from the book, not the edited copy that got printed in Harper's), "Host," "String Theory," and the thing about McCain's 2000 campaign, and if the footnotes and pomo self-referentialism haven't driven you nuts, go to the autobiographical short fiction, esp. "The Depressed Person" and "The Planet Trillaphon..." and go to the novels from there. I'd also recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan's review of The Pale King, which is less a review than a longform eulogy, and which captures the essence of Wallace and his work in a profound and heartrending way.

Personal aside: I think "Consider the Lobster" is flaccid as an argumentative essay, but works beautifully as autobiography, but I only felt this way after Wallace killed himself, which is precisely the kind of thing that would happen in a Wallace story ("...he was one of those writers who, even when you weren't sounding like him, made you think about how you weren't sounding like him" -Sullivan supra).

_________________
The Bulls haven't done anything wrong, and they're not going to do anything wrong.

Better than Tom Clancy?

_________________
Elections have consequences.