David Foster Wallace
Article
David Foster Wallace is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 05, 2021 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “The Last Psychiatrist blames overly facile Drug A/Drug B comparisons for killing David Foster Wallace”; “this book reminded them of include: David Foster Wallace”; “Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace”. It most often appears alongside Infinite Jest, The Last Psychiatrist, MeToo.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: February 05, 2021
- Last seen: September 06, 2024
Appears In
- WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise
- Highlights From The Comments On “Sadly, Porn”
- Your Book Review: Dominion
- Your Book Review: The Pale King
Related Pages
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- Infinite Jest (2 shared issues)
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- The Last Psychiatrist (2 shared issues)
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- [[entities/concept/metoo|#MeToo]] (1 shared issues)
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- 2023 special (1 shared issues)
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- 21st century political dogmatism (1 shared issues)
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- A.E. Waite (1 shared issues)
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- ACX grant winners (1 shared issues)
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- Adderall (1 shared issues)
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- Adlerian psychology (1 shared issues)
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- Advanced Tax (1 shared issues)
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- African Gray Parrot (1 shared issues)
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- AL (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
"You said Drug A is better for most people than Drug B. But I tried Drug A and it was terrible, then I tried Drug B and it cured everything. I think you need to make it clearer that Drug B can be better than Drug A sometimes." Investing in index funds is usually better than investing in lottery tickets, but one guy will get a winning lottery ticket on the day the stock market crashes and have the opposite result; it's still valuable to warn investors that one thing is better than another. On the other hand, The Last Psychiatrist blames overly facile Drug A/Drug B comparisons for killing David Foster Wallace. Do I want to kill David Foster Wallace? Sometimes, when I think about all the loose ends in Infinite Jest - but most of the time no.
Inline links: killing David Foster Wallace
I guess I have to read this now, don’t I? Other things people say this book reminded them of include: The Gervais Principle, Adlerian psychology, Rene Girard, and David Foster Wallace.
Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you.
Inline links: Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks.2 And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.
Inline links: 2
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was.
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was. The Project of David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest made Wallace a star. The book was both a literary sensation and cultural phenomenon, described by one commentator as “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Nonetheless, Wallace wasn’t totally satisfied. “I don’t think it’s very good,” he wrote, “some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” He grew determined to surpass Infinite Jest with something new.