
Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace - rms
http://www.kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-wallace
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jsomers
Hmm, DFW's sentences are occasionally indulgent, but they don't sound like
this. Here's a sample chosen (somewhat) haphazardly:

 _If we want to know what American normality is -- what Americans want to
regard as normal -- we can trust television. For television's whole_ raison
_is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian
mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom
mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better
profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just
invaluable, fiction-wise._

His style begs to be parodied but this is a facile attempt, in my opinion.

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unalone
The difference between DFW and this article is that DFW writes really, really
good sentences, that just happen to be incredibly huge. A parody most likely
won't be as good unless the parodist is brilliant as well (see the "Oxen of
the Sun" chapter in Ulysses).

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tptacek
You can do this to any sentence fragment. "Eleanor Rigby was lonely [1], like
many others." Fuckin' Beatles.

It sure does help to have the ideas to back up the style, though.

[1] (Here I should mention a habit of hers I had long noticed but never
commented on, which habit was that she would walk through churches after
weddings, employing her falcate digits to retrieve the spent grains of the
matrimonial offering.)

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bryanwoods
It's worth taking a look at the results of the David Foster Wallace Parody
Competitions:

<http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm>

Making lighthearted jokes about Wallace's syntax and verbosity are the common
first steps I've watched people make when they begin reading his prose, but it
usually doesn't take very more reading at all for these people to see that
even attempting to parody Wallace on a humorous, surface level would require
the kind of introspection and effort that takes a near-lifetime and of the
sort that probably isn't the most satisfying or healthy way for a person to
spend their time.

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relme
DFW's latest fiction in the New Yorker was really scary:
[http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309f...](http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace)

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andrewljohnson
Man, I wish he would have written another epic work of fiction before he died.
So sad. I loved Infinite Jest and Broom of the System.

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tptacek
You saw they're publishing The Pale King?

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all)

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andrewljohnson
Oh wow, thanks for the link!

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Silentio
Compare DFW with authors like Albert Camus and Simone Weil and it becomes
pretty clear a particular style has little to do with an author's perceived
brilliance -- it's about ideas.

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jacoblyles
Maybe the grammar section of my brain is slow today, but I didn't understand
the "absolute construction" at the end.

