From the “this could have helped me last summer” category comes this extremely detailed character map detailed the many many connections between and among the characters of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” which Amy and I both dedicated our Julys and Augusts to last year.
Click for full-size!
Using a statistical tool that “analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers,” I decided to determine what famous writer Grant is most similar to. In order to ensure the validity of this test, I selected a number of Grant’s recent posts to see if there is consistency in (a) this tool and/or (b) Grant’s writing style.
Based on this post: Margaret Atwood.
Using this post: David Foster Wallace.
By analyzing this entry: David Foster Wallace.
And finally, based the most popular post accessed on this site: Dan Brown.
Thus, according to my analysis, Grant tends to write like a male whose name begins with a “D.” That’s science.
You can analyze your own writing style at I Write Like (iwl.me).
(According to this humble entry, I also write like David Foster Wallace.)
Amy and I have posted a few times about David Foster Wallace, because we each read Infinite Jest during the “Infinite Summer” just past. I loved it. Amy, I think, believes it might have broken her brain, and it’s been tough for her to pick up a book since.
One of the things I loved about the book was its use of language (I’m not alone, I’m sure). DFW knows his way around the written word, that’s for sure.
Do you?
Try the David Foster Wallace grammar challenge. Ten questions, each with a glaring (to him) error. It’s tougher than it looks. I got a couple right, whiffed on a couple more, and couldn’t spot anything wrong with the bulk of them.
For example, what’s wrong with this sentence: “I only spent six weeks in Napa.” Can you spot it? It’s subtle, and I didn’t get it. But it sounds obvious to my ear once I read the answers, which you can find here, along with explanations.
Good luck!
In 2004, a review of David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion appeared in the academic journal Modernism/Modernity. It was titled “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent” and written by Jay Murray Siskind.
Who is a character out of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.
Yes, the review was a fake, albeit a playful fake, and it’s taken five years for anyone to notice. Gawker, where I saw the story, treat the story pretty cheekily:
Well, a couple people noticed. Anyone who actually read the review should’ve noticed, because if you’re reading Modernism/Modernity you really ought to recognize the visiting lecturer on Living Icons from White Noise. Especially once the review stopped addressing the Wallace book and detoured into DeLillo pastiche.
“It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I’ve always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.”
Some students have even unwittingly used the review as research for their papers, which is ironic on several levels. Mark Sample had one of those students. After noticing the review, and then promptly forgetting about it, he did a little digging and found that it has even been used as research for a theses, which Sample says shows the state of academia today:
The troubling blindness to contextuality and intertextuality (how could any 20th century Americanist, whether modernist or postmodernist, fail to see the references to perhaps one of the most important novels of the past fifty years) — this troubling blindness on both students and their advisors’ part turns a fun fake review into something much more telling about the state of academia.
While talking to Grant, he argued that maybe the article had points worthy enough to be included as research in an academic paper. Or perhaps we’re not giving the students enough credit. Maybe their use of the review is just an extension of the joke.
Either way, the editors of Modernism/Modernity wrote to Sample to clarify the review. It is fairly long, so I’ll only link to it (link!), but it is obvious that the review was only ever meant to be fun, and that the editors of the journal are still having fun with it. (A word to the wise: if you haven’t read White Noise, you really won’t get the jokes in the response).
As part of Infinite Summer, both Amy and I have embarked on the reading of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, “Infinite Jest.” It’s a 1,076-page monster, and although I’m not yet very far into it, I can already tell that its density has not been exaggerated.
Already, I’ve encountered things that I know will be richly rewarding in a way I can’t appreciate until I reread it. That thought fills me with both dread and delight.
I avidly anticipated coming across my first footnote, since they are legendary, and now that I have, I’d like to post something that was tweeted by Steve Juras a while back. Here’s a (pdf) link to David Foster Wallace’s course syllabus when he was teaching Literary Interpretation in 2005. It’s funny and dense and it’s got footnotes.
You should get a copy of Infinite Jest and join us in the read!
It does kind of shame me, as a literary type, to admit that I’ve never read Infinite Jest. Of all of David Foster Wallace’s great (I hear) writing, all I’ve read is “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” which is kind of like saying you went to Paris and spent the whole week at the Eiffel Tower.
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is the one thing that everyone’s read, because it’s short and it’s easy to get through and it’s funny. I loved it.
Infinite Jest is not short, nor is it easy to get through. In fact, it’s over 1,000 pages, and it’s notoriously difficult to get through. It’s also rumoured to be fabulously rewarding for those who do persevere.
This is the summer to finally read it all the way through. Why not? Everyone else is. Like Colin Meloy, lead singer of The Decemberists.
No, I’m serious — it’s “Infinite Summer”. There’s a blog and everything.
Pitched as “an endurance reading event,” the online book club plans to read through the whole book, starting tomorrow (Sunday). They’ve set a pace to 75 pages per week, meaning you can finish it this summer.
Of course, after having trekked to every damn bookstore in the city, I can’t find a copy of Infinite Jest anywhere, so I’m probably going to have to buy it on Amazon and then catch up, but I’m going to do it!
And I’m going to make Amy do it with me.
Surprise! Don’t you like finding things out on the blog, Amy?
Although I had read mostly his Harper’s Magazine work and none of his novels, I was still saddened when I heard of David Foster Wallace‘s death. I’m reminded of it because Steve Juras’ Twitter feed pointed me to a touching, poignant article written by the person who designed his books (the insides, not the cover):
Had I realized at the time that this job would entail my spending close to an hour every few weeks talking to my favorite author ever on the phone, I would have never considered giving it to anyone else. Mostly we just went over changes that needed to be made, but initially we had some very intense discussions regarding the semiotics of the leaders (the lines going from the text to the boxes) and the tics and the line width of the boxes and the ampersands. He’d leave me voice mail messages at work in the middle of the night, telling me what time I should call him the next day. One time when I called, I got his answering machine, but when I began to leave a message, he picked up. “I heard your mellifluous voice,” he said.
It is simultaneously a glimpse inside how an author’s manuscript goes from typewritten pages and ideas to a final finished book as well as a glimpse inside David Foster Wallace as well.
(photo by Steve Rhodes)
