

David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact - Thevet
http://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/15/david-foster-wallace-and-the-nature-of-fact/

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rroblak
One thing to add to this discussion— DFW's description of the Federer/Agassi
point in _Roger Federer as Religious Experience_ doesn't actually match up all
that well with what actually happened.

See for yourself:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDwG5rJVtdc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDwG5rJVtdc)

And note the discussion in the comments about the video not matching up at all
with DFW's description, despite key indicators that it is the point DFW was
talking about[1].

[1] Key indicators such as Federer's backsteps and McEnroe's commentary.

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evmar
Though I have a great appreciation for DFW's work (the linked article even
links to the early essay of his I resurrected from paper), I found he tended
to exaggerate, at least when discussing topics I'm knowledgeable about. (In
particular I'm thinking about some of the math in IJ, but I know I have this
impression from more than just that.)

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poppingtonic
I'd like to point out the following paragraph as evidence of a rather hackerly
trait in DFW.

"The publication limited him to 1,000 words, which Wallace elided by
transgressing the traditional review format. He composed the entire piece as a
series of bullet points, each beginning with a dependent clause followed by a
colon (which functions as a verb)[ix] and then a predicate. His rhetorical
reasoning was both innovative and ironic: “Tactical reason for review form:
The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither
subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognized grammatical
unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against R.T.’s
rigid 1000-word limit.” He called this 'new, transgeneric critical form: the
Indexical Book Review.' "

~~~
codingthebeach
I've always thought of a lot of DFW's writing as a kind of programming.
There's the main narrative thread of whatever he's talking about at a given
time-slice, then there are the "worker threads" he spins off from that in the
form of random lateral jumps to stream-of-consciousness, the 24-page footnote
containing a single run-on sentence, etc. Certainly in IJ, and to a lesser
degree in his other works, there are multiple "paths" the thread of execution
can take to reach the end of the book. Put another way: are DFW's footnotes
intended to be read synchronously or asynchronously? If you read them
synchronously, it tends to interrupt the flow of the main narrative (context
switches are expensive). If you read them asynchronously, you miss a lot of
context and, possibly, the author's intended ordering/synchronization of the
ideas. And of course all of this is intentional, and gives his writing a
"meta" dimension that standard English don't usually have (usually for good
reasons).

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maroonblazer
Has anyone who possesses the requisite math background read DFW's "Everything
and More: A Compact History of Infinity"?

When I read it I wasn't equipped with the math to understand the more
technical parts, yet I still enjoyed it. Perhaps I was naive though, and to
the intended audience it doesn't hold up for one reason or another...?

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wldcordeiro
Two David Foster Wallace posts in two days, I can't complain about that.

