Interesting Article on David Foster Wallace `85

[johnwesley]

<p>From last Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html</a></p>

[kwu]

<p>

At 20 I congratulated myself on my awareness of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, the arbitrariness of critical proclamations, the folly of received wisdom. I pored over the Deconstructionists and the French feminists and advocated, in complete seriousness, the overthrow of language. (Also, the patriarchy.) Then I went to law school and was forced to confront serious practical and ethical questions — Brown v. Board of Education, for instance, and Roe v. Wade — that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida. Now, having entered and abandoned the practice of law and spent roughly a decade straddling legal publishing and the blogosphere, I’m increasingly drawn to directness, which precludes neither nuance nor irony. (For details, see the essays of Mark Twain, who believed that “plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”)

</p>

<p>What the hell is this ego-stroking digression doing here? The schmuck is guilty of following the very trend he’s criticizing. </p>

<p>Or did I just get ■■■■■■■ hard?</p>

[johnwesley]

<p>Um, I severely doubt Maud Newton had you in mind when she wrote the article.</p>

[kwu]

<p>Why so severe?</p>

<p>I’m merely questioning whether Maud was conscious of Maud’s hypocrisy when Maud had been writing this article. Was Maud trying to make a funny?</p>

[johnwesley]

<p>You don’t think the similarity was deliberate? I read that as her attempt at being ironic.</p>