Best products from r/davidfosterwallace
We found 15 comments on r/davidfosterwallace discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 14 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.
1. Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Literary Conversations Series)
- Scholastic
Features:
3. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present
- Great product!
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6. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
- W W Norton Company
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7. Understanding David Foster Wallace (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
- Used Book in Good Condition
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8. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing": New Essays on the Novels
- Used Book in Good Condition
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9. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
11. David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words
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13. Infinite LEGO: Reimagining David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest through LEGO
- 104 keys Include hot keys and 9 multimedia keys for easy typing and control.
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The DFW audio project is a great place to find interviews. The Bookworm interviews with Michael Silverblatt tend to be interesting.
Sounds like you already found the Charlie Rose interview. The ZDF German Television interview is excellent. There is also a panel discussion done at a New Yorker Festival that was after Wallace's death that was really good. It includes people that were very close to him. It's called "Rereading David Foster Wallace."
There's a good collection of print interviews called "Conversations with David Foster Wallace". It contains a lot of the most important print interviews.
edit: added links
TL;DR - Wallace had really wide tastes, enjoying lowbrow fiction, highbrow fiction, technical philosophy, critical theory, poetry, Cosmopolitan, and rap music. So I don't think the list was a joke. It might not necessarily have been the 10 books he would save from a fire, but plausibly '10 books anyone, no matter their background, can and should read'.
I don't have my copy of 'Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself' to hand, but there are passages in there where he talks about it. I'll try to remember to edit them in when I get home.
I'll be skimming 'Every Love Story...' today and adding quotes as I find them / if I remember to.
p143 - "Wallace also began to write book review for newspapers and magazines. Though he took them for money, these two helped him organise his thinking. Since his teenage years he'd had a taste for thrillers - they answered the need in his brain for instantly recognisable structures and cartoonish characters."
Here are some links to get you started.
Here's a page from the Harry Ramson archive.
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/teaching/
Here's a 2005 syllabus that includes Silence of the Lambs
http://alasophia.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-foster-wallaces-syllabus.html
Bonus Round: He also read self-help fiction in depth, as well as everything else.
http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library
And of course, rap.
http://www.amazon.com/Signifying-Rappers-Race-Urban-Present/dp/0880015357
One thing that would give you some great context on this question is the collection of interviews DFW gave over the course of his life. He was remarkably prescient about the development of a lot of things, one of which was the role technology (and the internet) would play in people's lives;
https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-David-Foster-Wallace-Literary/dp/1617032271/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=J1GSMG16N98V1326KPDY
There was a great line from one of the interviews, (which made it's way into the movie) that went something like;
"It (technology) is going to get better and better, and it's going to easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone. With images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money".
Which can be applied to the social media era to which you describe.
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If you haven't yet, do yourself a favor and listen to any of the recordings that Wallace has of him reading his own work. My favorite is "Consider the Lobster," available on amazon, which has him reading four of his essays.
In addition to his prose already being just incredibly awesome, something about his voice reading his own words is almost transcendental. Hearing his personal inflections and intonations on his writing adds a whole new level to the experience.
I often listen to this collection while on long journeys, either on airplanes or even just hiking through the woods. His stories told in his own voice are hypnotizing on just so many levels.
This is the best example I can find quickly. You can probably just google the ISBN on the book you have to get more information about it.
I would be interested in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
Is that a possibility?
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Wallace-Contemporary-American-Literature/dp/1570038872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427486528&sr=8-1&keywords=understanding+david+foster+wallace
This: I've read everything available (PhD candidate writing on DFW--Boswell is the best)
Followed closely by this:http://www.amazon.com/David-Foster-Wallace-Long-Thing/dp/1628924535/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1427486528&sr=8-3&keywords=understanding+david+foster+wallace
Stephen Burn is pretty good... but. Boswell is in a league of his own.
It's based on David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Eisenberg plays Lipsky.
I think by the whole ‘nobody is an atheist’ thing, he means that nobody is without a captivation toward something exterior or bigger than themselves (i.e. God, a project, a deity, sports team etc.). All people are worshipers of something. Therefore, there are no people who are without or indifferent to (a—) an object (God) (—theist) of worship/attention/praise. Nothing about this is weak logical reasoning—you just have to see into the meaning through how the terms are used. That’s a very brief Wittgensteinian analysis of this, at least, who was a great philosopher and was a massive influence on DFW. Though I could be mistaken here, since you’re use of ‘literal’ might be more narrow. Although, I don’t see what’s not literally obvious about what he was intending.
As to you’re later point about him not being a philosopher nor a logical thinker, I’d really push back. The dude had an undergrad in philosophy, published work (see here) and went to graduate school for a short time—all of which was primarily centered around symbolic logic and semantics.
My interpretation of what you were getting into could be wrong and perhaps you have countless other examples of his logical lacking ‘rigour.’ I realize that this is the exact kind of fan-boy analysis one would expect to defend DFW. This isn’t meant to be that. I just think you’re mistaken.